Category: Reckoning 6

Nicholas Clute

“You hear about those people putting gills in their necks?”

“Yeah.”

“It won’t let you live underwater, y’know, like a fish, but it gives you a bit of time. Lets you stay down longer.”

“Yeah.”

“Man, I’d kill for some gills sometimes. Remember when I got my arm stuck? I could’ve had time to get free on my own, wouldn’t have gone loopy. Wouldn’t have needed you there.”

“They let you talk underwater too?”

“Shut up, man, just keep rowing.”

Two brothers of unequal age sat across from each other in a small wooden boat. Young was just a boy, fragile, and animated. Allas was quiet, his body sunburned and broad. They paddled across the choppy bay from Oakland to the remains of San Francisco. It was difficult, rowing into the wind.

“It also shows you’re a diver, y’know?” Young continued. “Like, everyone knows you don’t just muck around the swamps for pitch, you dive. If I had cash I’d get gills. I’ll probably get a tattoo instead, on my neck like the real thing. You thought about getting a tattoo?”

“I don’t need to show off like that.”

“Whatever, man, I know plenty of people who got them.”

“Like who?” asked Allas.

“Jere does.”

“Him? You know why he has money, right?”

“So what? He’s living big.”

Allas laughed. “What’s he doing running around with you then?”

“Fuck you, we go way back.” Young scowled. “One day, I’ll live big.”

Allas pulled up the oars for a moment, seawater sparkling as it dripped down their length and dropped into the boat. The beige hills of Oakland rose above the bay, throwing shadows in the morning light. Heat was already radiating off the water, and he could feel the wind blowing them backwards. “Hey, you know I was joking.”

“Whatever. I’m not gonna keep diving for this shit forever.”

Young stood up, snatched the oars, and pushed Allas aside to take his seat rowing. He nearly upset the boat in the process. They continued in silence. The windswept archipelago grew nearer, and they could make out shattered cars, tangled telephone wires, and the rust-streaked decay of abandoned buildings. It was beautiful in a brutal way, those scraps of the city not yet claimed by the rising tide.

“What’ll you do when you’re rich?” Allas asked. They stood and swapped oars again.

“I dunno, man, I’ma leave this shitty work, leave Oakland, y’know? Get myself a place up high, that looks over the Bay, looks over the City,” Young waved his hands at everything that lay in front of him, excited. “Maybe somewhere towers don’t block the sunset. Somewhere I can relax in a big ass bed and look down at everyone below me.”

Allas clenched his jaw. He and Pa would always be afterthoughts. Even in Young’s dreams, family was ballast that held him down.

“The normal spot or somewhere new?” Allas asked.

Young pulled a coin from the bag at his waist. “Tops is our normal place,” he said, tossing it up, then snatching it out of the air. He opened his hand, revealing a worn face. “Tops.”

They rowed around the largest island, toward their lucky bay, but there was another boat there already. It was small, delicate, with thin sides and shiny paint. Nothing like their peeling craft. A man in a black wetsuit fiddled with an oxygen tank, preparing to dive.

“Hiya!” Young chirped. “Can we share the water?”

There was no response. Allas rowed closer.

“Hey mister, do you mind . . . .” But the diver cut Young off.

“You don’t have an anchor, do you? Get the hell outta here, you’re gonna crash into me.”

Allas turned their boat so he faced the diver.

“There’s plenty of water here for all of us,” he said, gesturing at the placid bay. “We’ll be careful . . . .” But the diver started shouting.

“Did you hear me, jackass? Are you dumb, or am I gonna have to make you go?”

The man reached behind the gunwale and lifted up a sleek speargun. Allas pulled their boat away as fast as he could; a hiss passed their bow as the spear splashed nearby. The most direct retreat led them closer to the unprotected mouth of the bay.

“Hey, hey we’re getting near the open . . . .” Young said, anxious.

“Not now.”

They rowed into the hot wind. Salt spray scratched their throats and whipped their eyes, but Allas kept a course around the outer point. Soon they found themselves in a narrow passage between two jagged rock islands that only gave minimal protection.

“Current’s too strong to float,” he said. “We’ll have to paddle the boat in place.”

“Is it worth it?” replied Young, unsure.

“You know the deal.”

Young nodded, reassuring himself. “Tops we leave.” He flipped the coin; a sudden gust of wind took the coin, and his brother lunged to save it from going overboard.

Allas opened his hand. “I’ll dive first.”

He pulled off his shirt, flexed his broad shoulders, and strapped a short knife to his ankle. He breathed deep, exhaling more fully each time. Releasing air, he began to hum, a noise that was halfway between a meditative mantra and a death rattle.

He was a good diver—even without oxygen tanks, he could stay underwater for five minutes, almost six if he didn’t exert himself. He stood up, eyes placid, bumped his brother’s fist, and then backflipped into the water with a smooth motion. Young hooted at the spectacle, pulling on the oars to fight the wind.

The water was cool but not unpleasant. Allas swam deeper, getting his bearings: a decrepit slide and jungle gym poked through ribbons of kelp down below. Buildings shouldn’t be too far away. He kicked until he saw a wide boulevard, lined with the sagging shells of once ornate buildings, their trim rotted by salt water.

All of this was a bad sign; it usually grew along old industrial areas where it could leach contaminants, not the residential parts of town. He surfaced.

“I dunno if it’s any good here, we’re in the fancy part. There’s a playground,” said Allas.

“I’ll try some side streets, look for a warehouse.”

They swapped places and Young dove down. Allas rowed to keep the boat between the only landmarks he could see, the crumbling spire of the cathedral on the east island and an old power pole atop jagged cliffs to the west.

Young was down for a long time. Just as Allas began to worry, his brother surfaced, hands filled with a silver sludge, flecked with turquoise. Glitterpitch.

“Damn, is that real?”

The power plants paid handsomely for the stuff, a fissile biomaterial with a twelve-syllable name. But to divers, it was sticky silver gunk they called glitterpitch. Nobody knew exactly how or where it grew. Most people tramped through the marshes of Oakland, gleaning bits of it at a time.

There had to be something wrong—the pitch Young gathered looked pure, and he held more in his hands than they could hope to collect in a day, even a week.

“Go down, it’s crazy,” Young gasped. “It’s blooming.”

Allas looked at him with a blank expression, unclear.

“Behind the buildings east of the big street. Third one down has a busted roof, it’s all up in there.”

Allas pulled his brother into the boat, and helped scrape the silver mess into a tub. They’d never needed this much space for the pitch, they would have to be creative to bring it all back. He took a deep breath and dove down again.

Passing the playground and the boulevard, Allas kicked along the surface of the streets, looking for the signs of pitch. He swam upwards, over the roofs of the buildings, until he saw a great skylight, shattered long ago. The kelp-rimed opening led into a dim grotto. He pushed himself through, down to the remains of the third floor.

He was overwhelmed by uncanny as he swam around a living room forty feet underwater. A family of crabs had taken residence in one corner, and a built-in bench by the ruined bay window was covered in oyster shells. Allas sat down, staring at the room.

People had lived here, never knowing their house would one day be submerged. What had it been like, living through the rise? Waves lapping the street and steps, wetting the books propped under the kitchen table to keep it level, washing away the patched quilts on their bed. Slowly but forever rising, squeezing everything away.

It was okay, though, the sea was done rising. He and his brother and their father were safe enough in their house across the bay and up the hills. The house that was so unlike the one he sat in now; for one, their house wasn’t covered in glitterpitch, soft, oily silver mounds shimmering with turquoise. Its glimmer danced as you looked at it, twirling in the light as if it were alive.

How long had he been down? He was getting loopy, he realized with a start. He jammed fistfuls of glitterpitch into a pocket, and pushed off toward the surface, tendrils of turquoise and silver spiraling off his bare feet.

It took him several minutes to regain his breath once he was back, Young pounding his back.

“There’s . . . . There’s so much. Where did it come from? There’s no . . . . The growth?”

His brother understood. “It’s just going crazy there, what’s it feeding on?”

“Maybe we’ve got it wrong,” Allas said, recovering. “Maybe polluted places don’t grow it best, maybe they just grow it slowest. We find it there before it burns out and dissipates.”

They were eager to harvest. Young clipped a small bag to his waist before diving in. Most days he filled it with shellfish, knick knacks, remnants of the old city he found along the seafloor: detritus. Today, they would fill all the space they could afford.

Allas stayed in the boat, struggling to keep it still. The winds whistled through the strait, making it almost as much work above as it was below. At least up here he could breathe.

His brother surfaced a few meters away, and Allas rowed over. Helping him over the side of the boat, his jaw dropped. He knew the bloom was large, but Young’s thin body was covered in silver pitch. It coated his long dark eyelashes, clung to his short fingernails; every inch of the boy’s skin was plastered, and lugubrious drips of opalescent oil slowly slid down his face. He didn’t even bother to scrape off the precious sludge, simply upending his bag into the tub. It contained no sand or silt, no fish bones or rubble. They were splattered in wealth.

The brothers dove, frantic at first, but as the day wore on they slowed to take their time. The sun shone down, kissing their arms and legs as they took their turns, diving and rowing.

“What are we gonna do with all of it?” Young asked as they ate lunch. “What do you think it’s worth? It’s gotta be worth more ’cause it’s pure?”

“I don’t know.”

“Y’know, I’m gonna do it. I’ma get those gills.”

“Yeah?”

“We get rich from diving, I wanna do something that honors that, y’know?”

Allas laughed and nodded, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. He stretched an arm out, trails of silver swirling off where his knuckles brushed the water.

“I’ll get nicer shoes too,” Young continued. “Something that lasts longer than the shit I got back home. I’m sick of feeling every goddamn step I take, y’know?”

Allas’ smile faltered. Young hadn’t been able to dive with him until recently. After their father’s accident, he’d been the only one making money for the family. It had never been enough. Even with both boys diving, they barely scraped by.

“And I’ma buy us another boat,” continued Young, not noticing his brother’s melancholy. “A bigger one so we can pay people to dive for us. Think about that, being a captain, being in charge. I’ll get one of those fancy boats you can sleep on.

“But you know what, I think I’ma do something none of us ever done, I’m gonna go all the way up north, see what that’s like. They don’t have to buy water, I hear. Crazy. I hear it gets cold up there, that it actually rains. I don’t know anyone who’s been to another country.”

Allas sighed quietly. Their dreams had just become reality, and he still wasn’t a part of his brother’s future.

“What’ll you do?” Young asked, suddenly looking back.

“I’ve never really thought about it,” said Allas. “Yeah, I guess we would start a fleet.”

The small boy nodded eagerly, drinking in the future with abandon.

“And I think I’d get us a new house, something bigger and more comfortable. Not too far away from the neighborhood, I know Dad likes it there. But somewhere we don’t need bars on the windows. Somewhere with a deck. We could sit out back, watch the sun set, and just be happy there. Be a family.”

He never allowed himself to dream like this, and was unsettled by how easily these plans poured from his mouth. Now that they were rich.

Allas continued, “Even if it takes all the money we get from this, we’ll get Dad some new legs, y’know? I haven’t seen him run in years. He used to love that, the days he didn’t dive he’d wake up early and just run. Up and down the hills, along the shore as the sun came up. Before the city was awake, he’d always say. He used to do that to clear his head. Before . . . you know, before all that he used to love running. We can get him fixed now.”

“Man, why don’t you ever want anything for yourself?” Young’s smooth face had darkened into ugly resentment. “It’s always what you’d do for me, for Dad. It’s never about you.”

Allas considered this for a moment. “I want you to be happy, Dad to be happy. I dunno, that’s what I want.” He sat up, pulled the oars a few strokes to reposition them, then laid them back down.

“I just wanted to have this one day to feel good, y’know,” said Young, raising his voice. “To have some actual happy thoughts about the future. This is the first time I haven’t had to spin bullshit, make everything seem okay.

“You’re always so fucking happy all the time, so good at putting on the right face, saying the right thing, doing the right thing. It’s so goddamn exhausting, and I’m tired. I’m tired of you being perfect, always being the role model and me being the fuckup. No, don’t act like I don’t know. I see how y’all look at me.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean . . . .”

“You didn’t mean what?” Young cut in. “To always be right? To always be better? You could be going places with your life, but you’re gonna help the family, no matter what it costs you.

“Fuck. I wish I was you. What is it I’m missing? I can’t even be mad at you because you’re always doing the right thing. Won’t you just get pissed or be selfish, just once? For me?”

They sat in silence. A new wind blew, sudden chill biting at their arms. Allas reached for the oars, but his brother pushed him back, firm, aggressive.

“Fuck, off, I can do this. You paddled us out here. Like always.”

Young piloted them back into the middle of the channel and they finished their lunch to make room for more pitch. Eventually Young broke the silence.

“Look, this sucks. I don’t have a reason to hate you. You’re everything to me. I can’t hate you, so I need to figure out how to not hate myself, I guess.”

Tears cut streaks through the salt and pitch that stained Young’s face.

“It’s not easy,” said Allas, his voice breaking. “It’s not. And I’m not perfect, no matter what you think. You’re good at forgetting when I mess up. You’re real good at that.

“You’re not a screwup, man. You’re young, you’re learning. You don’t know how proud of you Dad and I are. We don’t tell you that enough.”

Young wiped his face, smearing his tears.

“You’re right to dream bigger than me,” said Allas. “There’s nothing wrong with dreaming big, but you gotta dream big enough for the both of us. Because you know I’m no good at it.”

They both sat there for a minute, eyes cast downward.

“I’m gonna go down again.” Young said, sniffing. “Get the rest of what’s there.”

He reached for Allas’ shoulder, gentle and firm; the two shared their gaze for a moment, then Young dove overboard, leaving him rocking and alone adrift with the wind.

They scooped up treasure and kept their boat from the rocks. The sun lowered in the sky, and they filled their boat with pitch. Young was underwater when Allas saw the new shiny boat round the corner, the solo diver headed towards them. They kept their distance and continued to dive.

Young’s head broke the surface in a frenzy.

“He’s stuck, he’s down there, he got stuck!” Young wheezed, sucking air into his lungs.

“What are you talking about?”

“The other guy, the other diver. He was trying to find our bloom, and he got stuck in a car down there!”

“Can you help him?”

“I tried, I need your help!”

“We’ll crash!” said Allas, motioning to the cliffs.

Young let out a pained cry, and dove below the surface.

Allas rowed the boat in a circle, nervous thoughts racing through his head. What could he do? Leave the boat to crash, all for a man who had tried to kill them earlier?

Young’s head broke the waves again, more frantic than before.

“His leg’s stuck, man, he’s drowning! I need you, now!”

“What am I supposed to do?” Allas shouted.

Young stared at him, saying nothing, then dove down again. His silence was worse than words. Their earlier conversation echoed in his head.

You’re always doing the right thing.

Allas let out an anguished yell and dove into the waves.

Below the surface, the afternoon sun had turned the old city into a forest of cerulean shadow. He kicked down to the street level and looked for his brother. Near the building with their bloom he spotted his brother swimming in circles around the pitted carcass of a car, a flood of bubbles erupting from the far side.

The diver had somehow trapped his leg in the door and severed a breathing line on the jagged metal. The man was trapped and drowning. Allas motioned to the diver to relax, and to his brother to help him. The diver made incomprehensible signals, grabbing at Allas’ shoulders as if he were drunk. They needed to act fast.

On the sidewalk, there was a long metal tube covered in barnacles; the fallen remnant of a street sign. It took them both, but they swam the pole over to the car and pried it against the door. The jaws snapped open, and the diver’s leg was freed. Both brothers pushed off toward the surface, but the man was not following. He stayed near the car, hips and legs flailing.

Allas motioned for his brother to ascend, and then dove back down, wrapping his long arms around the diver. The man wouldn’t budge, his weight belt caught on something. Frantic, Allas pulled the knife from his ankle and cut any strap he could grasp, slashing the man free. The diver thrashed, and they slammed into a raw metal edge of the car; a bloom of red erupted from the boy’s arm. It would be okay, he thought, the diver was loose. He held him tight, and together they swam toward the dark reflection of the surface.

Allas tried to pull himself upward, but his arm refused commands, floating by his side. He kicked harder, the soles of his feet tickled by the rush of air escaping the diver’s tank they’d left down below. It was strange, he realized, that he should feel like this, his lungs on fire for want of air when he was surrounded by perfect, breathable bubbles. He opened his mouth, reaching to swallow one, but it darted out of his reach and upward. He kept going, following that bubble’s rise, but the surface seemed so far away, and he was very tired of swimming. How long had he been underwater? The math was simple: several years of diving, twenty dives a day (usually), five minutes a dive (give or take), that makes almost a thousand days spent underwater. No, five hundred. Wait, hours, not days. Divide that by twenty-four . . . . How old was he now, had he spent most of his life underwater? Surrounded by water, at least. It followed him wherever he went, from the steam lifting off his coffee each morning to the clouds that passed overhead, their moisture just out of reach. When he was young his mother used to take him to the docks to watch the great tankers pull into harbor, metal-bellied leviathans, each unloading over a trillion liters of Chinese freshwater into the city tanks so that Oakland could drink and bathe and grow plants on their balconies and rooftops and community gardens, trillions of liters of water from each of the ships and yet they were nothing but drops compared to the vastness of ocean upon which he floated. His head swam with numbers, mathematics looping through his mind and tumbling around him as a million porcelain bubbles passed before his eyes. He hadn’t thought of his mom in a long time.

They shattered the mirrored surface and he released his grip on the diver. His head was above water, but he could not inhale. His small, fragile brother swam over to him, shouting or maybe mumbling, but he did not notice because he was calmly drifting on his back, captivated by the sky which was painted in streaks, orange and purple blending together at the margins, the colors pulsing with the slowing beat of his heart. It was peaceful, the world a beautiful blur whose edges faded to blank perfection.

With a sudden rush, purple clouds and orange sunset snapped into focus. He gasped. He could hear his own breath, his heart pounding in his ears, his brother shouting at him. The volume of the world had been turned back up and it was excruciating.

“He’s breathing, it’s okay man, we’re okay,” Young was shouting, holding the other diver in a rescue position while treading water. He jerked his head to the island to the east, where the remains of a road slumped into the sea. “We just gotta get to that little beach over there, okay?” Allas assented without words.

As they dragged themselves onto the small patch of ground, he looked back at the channel. The boats had crashed; their small and sturdy craft sliced through the thin skin of the other, and both were leaking. Clinging together like doomed lovers, the boats turned languid circles, drifting inexorably across the channel toward the jagged cliffs.

Young laid the diver down on the gravel and began to run back into the water, but with his good arm Allas pulled him out of the surf and into a tight embrace. They struggled at first, but exhausted and injured, they soon held each other still.

The brothers stood there, warm wind drying the water on their faces, as they watched the boats throw themselves against the rocks. The hulls were soon splintered and ripped, and from those gashes bled oily silver mud, turquoise flecks glowing in the setting sun.

The nicer boat lay strewn across the rocks like discarded rubbish. Their small craft, everything they had in this world, bobbed on the surface for a moment that seemed to last forever, then slipped below the seafoam.

They carried the limp diver along a road up the island, shattered asphalt biting their bare feet. Atop were the remains of an old cathedral, a great grey shell that once loomed over the city. It was ruined, but it would shelter them for the night. They shuffled through a great arched doorway and laid the diver to recover on the low stone altar.

The brothers sat in the second row of cold pews. Behind them the sun burned away as always, from yellow to peach to twilight. Before them was a hole in the structure, yawning nothing where the sacristy once stood. They watched their shadows lengthen, blend into dusk as the sun passed away. Through the void in the church was the city, their city, individual lights winking on as night approached. Wind whistled through the husk of this sacred place. Young turned to his brother, who was leaned forward as if in prayer.

“They’ll come looking for him, right?”

Allas did not answer.

“And they’ll pick us up too. And then we’ll find that again, won’t we? I bet we can. Now we know how it blooms, we can find another, right? I know we will. We can come out here again, real soon. Once your arm’s better.”

Allas sat there with his eyes closed, head resting on the pew in front of them, arm limp at his side. It did not hurt. It did not feel much at all.

He looked at the diver drying upon the altar. A small beacon strapped to his ankle was blinking, a slow pulse of reassurance. Rescue would come, eventually. Allas turned to his brother, the small boy whose eyes burned fierce with hope.

Allas nodded once, then nodded again, and put his good arm around Young, pulling him close. “Yeah. We’ll find it again.”

Young leaned into his brother’s shoulder, relaxing into that steadfast warmth. They sat there for a long time, together, while around them the day evaporated and quietly condensed into night.

Nicasio Andres Reed

Salt had crept in while he was away, and now the freshwater wetlands of Gino’s childhood are a marsh, brackish and fickle. There is the soccer field where he’d stained his knees; it had been a low, dry rise of earth bracketed by mud and cordgrass, and today is impassable, a thicket of cattails in algae-skinned water, a humming choir of insects. And here the Jiffy Lube where Gino got his first job, and the stand of trees outside it where Gino smoked his first cigarettes. A line of fat, old maples that in the summer had dropped their seeds in spinning helicopter wings by the whirling hundreds, and in the autumn had lit up like matchheads, screaming into the sky. First week of June now, and they’re not doing much of anything, their branches almost bare, bark corpse-grey from drinking saltwater. Around the corner to Mifflin St, past the stripped bones of the gas station, up two blocks to the high tide line at the sandbagged steps of the Shop & Go, the empty lot opposite repurposed into a dock for the neighborhood fleet: half a dozen rowboats with their oars padlocked athwart, one eight-seater bowrider with yellowing upholstery, one jet ski, and, as they come into dock, the roofed pontoon that Gino caught a ride on, a Habitat for Humanity donation.

“Forty.” Benji, the helmsman.

“Get outta here.” Gino, sucking his teeth.

“We got a problem?”

“Nah, man. Nah.” Gino digs out his wallet.

“Cash.”

“Yeah, I figured. Y’all getting a lotta outages?”

Benji counts through the ones and fives. “More power outages than power. We on generators, if we on.”

“Shit.”

Benji shakes his head. “Is what it is. You need directions?”

“I’m good, thanks. I grew up around here.”

The boardwalk from the boats to dry asphalt is made of wooden shipping pallets, new ones stacked on top of old when they’ve started to molder as the mud takes them. Gino slings his bag over his shoulder and walks across with his eyes on his feet, distrustful of the dark patches where it looks rotted through. The street is a relief, even with sedge and woolgrass cutting up through cracks in the pavement for the first few yards past the waterline.

The distance from the Stop & Go to his childhood home is the length of time it took to eat a bag of spicy pork skins and throw the evidence in a neighbor’s garbage can so his mom wouldn’t know he’d been ruining his dinner. But he’d measured it in a teenage boy’s appetite, and the walk seems quicker now. The streets narrower, the telephone poles shorter, the sky closer, everything more squat, and the gritty smell of the marsh clinging on even two blocks up the street. Still, it’s late in the afternoon and the sun on the clouds is starting to blush, so folks are setting themselves up on front stoops in threes and sixes with cigarettes and beer bottles and babies on bouncing knees, their friendly racket sounding to Gino something like a first language, so familiar, unheard for years. He gets a couple nods and throws them back, but nobody knows him on sight.

He turns the corner onto S Bonsall St. The sidewalk is broken in all the same spots he didn’t know he knew until he sees them again, and then he knows every fissure and crack, every dog paw immortalized in wet cement. No parked cars. A lot more boarded-up doors and windows than there used to be, although there’d always been some. There were never any front yards in the neighborhood, all the basement windows looking directly out onto the sidewalk. Now every house on the row that still looks occupied has a rain barrel out front, and a couple have one of those larger, galvanized metal cisterns that look like fat little grain silos. There’s a line of grass growing right down the middle of the street. Sedge, probably—a bad sign on what used to be high ground.

And then, inevitably, there’s #2017. He’s been gone almost twenty years and it looks . . . not the same, but like a faded photograph of itself. Gino doesn’t know if it’s looked like that for a while, or if it happened all at once. If a year ago, when his father died, the color drained from the house’s façade. He could still turn around.

It’s not that he hasn’t thought about his father’s death, or how it would be to come home and see the place without him. But he’s been able to think about it from a distance, know it without seeing it. And that’s worked out for him, overall. But from the bottom of the steps and through the screen door, there’s his mother’s voice telling someone to bring out the good plates, the ones for company. So much clearer than her voice over the phone, telling him she’d understand if he couldn’t make the trip, like she was forgiving him for disappointing her even before he did it.

Gino wants very much to be someone who doesn’t need to be forgiven. So, up the stairs he goes.

Gino was five years old when the bulge of the Schuylkill River met the fattened trickle of Cobb’s Creek to the east, and together they fingered their way west through parkways and backyards to touch the glutted Delaware. It was then declared that everything south of the Roosevelt Expressway was officially part of the greater Chesapeake floodplain. The majority of Philadelphia was under at least six inches of water, so the entirety of it was legally classified as inundated. The news, his folks, everyone adult he knew, kept track of the losses. The city took bids on where to relocate the Liberty Bell, and crowdfunded the removal and transport of the arch at the foot of Chinatown. The neighborhood threw up barriers around the Pentecostal church on Snyder Ave, and bought up and replanted mangroves from nurseries on the Jersey shore. They were losing more ground than they saved, though, for as long as he could remember.

When he was eight, the block half a mile away where his mom grew up was evacuated, and his grandpop moved in with them, slept on the couch. His sharp-pressed slacks and red-striped shirts displaced Gino’s clothes in the closet. His basketball games and bocce club pushed Gino out of the afternoons he’d spent with his dad. And his voice, old Philly, short vowels running up into each other, filtered into every room and out the front door onto the stoop, every day adding to his eulogy for the city. Grief was the background static of Gino’s childhood—everyone else’s grief for a place he’d never been.

Gino’s family’s place was in West Passyunk, a little too distant from the heart of old Italian Philadelphia to benefit from touristy nostalgia, and too Black and brown for their one sob story among many to generate charitable donations. Like for the Black folks down in Kingsessing, up in Kensington, the official plan was to leave it to rot in the water. But the less-than-a-mile-square from 20th St to 26th sat on a rise known only to kids who’d biked it, pushing and sweating up one way and gliding, legs storked out, down the other. While the rest of the neighborhood went to algae and rot, Gino’s old block and the couple dozen around it became an island in the marsh.

It was almost lucky. A mile in any direction, the government offered to buy homeowners out of their property for less than a quarter of how much it would cost them to start over somewhere further inland. Most people took it because, in the choice between an insultingly low offer and nothing at all, they figured it was better not to wait around for the insulting offer to expire. Up in the neighborhood, basements flooded, tap water went funny, electricity flickered and failed, but no buy-out offers came. And even as everything else changed, the old rule held true: if you didn’t get out of the neighborhood by the time you were eighteen, then chances were you were never getting out.

Gino left when he was eighteen. Gino’s older brother Stevie got married at eighteen. Stevie’s in his forties now, and on the couch this morning, his knees as high as his chest because his spot in the far corner has sagged under the years he’s spent there. There’s a stack of dishes and cutlery on the coffee table in front of him. He’s the ghost of their dad: heavy brows, a twice-broken nose, an ancient, thick sweater despite the heat, and a smile that’ll never let you in on the joke. More him than their mom, so more Filipino than Italian, and Gino, never pegged as either, remembers again to resent him for it.

“Jesus, you actually showed,” Stevie says to him. There’s a pause where Gino’s supposed to say something biting, but he doesn’t rise to it. Stevie shrugs. “You got about a minute to turn around and leave before the rest notice you’re here.”

“Eugenio.” Stevie’s husband, frozen halfway down the stairs. “Got some fuckin nerve showing up here.”

“Kevin,” Gino says. He hasn’t set his bag down yet. “You look good. Change your hair?”

“Don’t tell me how I fuckin look you—”

“Gino!” His name ricochets down the hall and around the kitchen, then back out into the living room, carried on the high voices of his nieces who make him hug them. One of them takes his bag upstairs, whispering something strident to her dad on the way. Jasmine, Gino thinks. The one with the freckles is Jasmine, and the other one is Roxie, who’s telling him about what they’re making in the kitchen, what they had to substitute in the pancit, and what they grew in the community garden. Cousins, assorted children, and neighborhood aunties and their husbands cycle into the room with dry kisses and slaps on the shoulder, telling him he hasn’t changed at all, telling him he’s gained weight. Kevin slips behind them all and into the kitchen, and Gino tells everyone that he needs to go volunteer to help out his mom before word spreads that he rolled up to her house expecting to stand around being waited on.

He steps heavy down the short hall back to the kitchen, less to give Kevin and his mom warning he’s coming, and more to spare himself whatever they were saying about him. Which might have been a sound strategy, in another family.

“Don’t know why he bothered,” Kevin is saying. From less of a distance now, Gino can see the white in his hair, and that the pinched line between his brows never quite disappears. Kevin spots Gino in the doorway and turns back to tell his mother-in-law, “It’s a cruel thing to do to you, Francesca. God knows he’s just gonna turn around and leave tomorrow.”

His mom, her small hands shiny with oil and flecked with carrot skins, turns and sees him. “Well,” she says. “Will you? Head out tomorrow?”

“Hey, Ma. Nah. No, I took the week off. Takes about a day to get back, though, took a day to get here, so. I can stay a couple days.” She looks him up and down, then away just as quickly, and goes back to chopping a lemon. He adds, “Right now there’s a break between the last project and this shoreline thing in Maine, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it.”

“Real glad you could squeeze us into your busy schedule,” Kevin says. “About a year late for the funeral, but it’s the thought that counts, right?” He leaves, a heaping bowl of rice under one arm and a pan of lasagna under the other.

For a long minute Gino just watches his mother work. Reaching for this and that. Washing her hands. There’s less of her in reality than there had been in his imagination. She tells him the garlic bread is ready, and he falls into the routine of ducking outside to turn off the gas, grabbing the wire basket off the top of the fridge, a cloth from the drawer on the left, and plucking the steaming slices from the oven pan, folding them under the cloth with the buttery smell of a thousand ancient dinners around the kitchen table. There’s a lot of chatter coming from the front room, and someone comes in and out of the back door to bring in the folding chairs that have been rusting out there since before Gino was born.

Gino hovers in the middle of the kitchen. He’s spent an inordinate amount of time over the past weeks thinking what he’d say to her. Even in his imagination, he never got it right. Finally, he asks, “Is there anything else to do?”

His mom waves a hand at him without turning around. “Take those out there.”

“Okay.” And then he tries, “I’m sorry, Ma.”

“For what?” She’s wiping down the counter now, piling pans and ladles in the sink.

“For . . . .” Gino takes a couple breaths. He’s feeling a little sick, which isn’t the same as feeling sorry, but is close enough that he’s sure it’s what he should say. “I should have been here. Last year.”

His mom is brisk, businesslike, with her hands. She shakes her head. “You were gone a long time before that. He knew you weren’t coming back.” She says it plainly, without accusation.

“Right,” Gino says. “Okay.” He carries the basket of bread into the front room.

Out front there are people everywhere on mismatched chairs, kids cross-legged on the floor, and not enough plates for everyone. A neighbor comes in the door with a package of paper plates to make up the difference. Stevie gestures Gino over to a spot he’s saved on the couch, and their mom comes in and settles herself into the big cracked-leather armchair that used to be their dad’s. There’s a moment where everyone pauses, leaning over their plates. The youngest kid in the room asks if they can eat now and uncle Lenny turns to Gino’s mom and says, “Hold up. Francesca? You want to say something?”

She says yes, and puts her plate down on her lap. She’d insisted on taking one of the paper plates. She runs a quick hand over the arm of the chair. It’s strange to see her in it. It’s strange to see her.

“I hear it’s not always easy to get here across the water these days, and it’s nice to see you who did.” She nods at some folks who Gino didn’t know had moved away. “The house is always better with a whole lot of people in it, even if it’s a little crowded. Nato and I moved in here a few months before Stevie was born. All the way cross town for an extra bedroom. When we had Eugenio and he wanted his own room, Nato told him, you can make a down payment, then you get your own room.” There’s some laughter in Gino’s direction. His mom turns to her own brother. “And Lenny, you know our dad, God rest him, he didn’t like me taking up with Nato, didn’t like us moving away from the old neighborhood, and we had some conversations about all that.”

Lenny chuckles, incredulous. “That what you wanna call it?”

“Alright,” she says. “We had some loud conversations about all that. But then give it ten, twenty years and him and Nato were best goddamn friends, getting up to all sorta trouble together, here in this house. When dad passed, I was a mess. You know what I mean, I wasn’t ready for that.” She looks at Gino for a moment, then at Stevie. “And your father, he held me up and gave me ways to say goodbye. We did this for my dad, the year after. And if anyone said it was a little strange to have a babang luksa for some old Italian from South Philly, then they had to have a loud conversation with me.” She clutches a hand on Lenny’s knee. “This year yous’ve all held me up. So. Let’s eat, and say goodbye to Nato.”

Kevin and a cousin who Gino can’t place take charge of dishing out food. There’s a massive salad that he hadn’t noticed before, weighted down by a mound of black olives and grated parmesan. The lasagna is meatless, but the pancit bihon has chicken and liver, and there’s something that smells like adobo even if it doesn’t look like it. Jasmine and Roxie start a fork war over the best-looking corner slice of lasagna, which Kevin settles by taking it for himself. Gino lets mostly everyone be served before him while he tries to unclench his hands and his jaw.

From his left, Lenny shovels all the olives from his own plate onto Gino’s, an old joke he’d forgotten they shared. “Good to have you around here,” Lenny says.

“Can’t get anyone else to take these off your hands?”

“Not all of ’em at once, I gotta do two here, three there, hit five, six plates. It’s a logistical nightmare.”

“That’s rough, man. Lucky I’m a logistics guy.”

“Oh yeah? You still with the ah, what’s the thing?”

“Army Corps of Engineers, yeah.” Gino catches Lenny’s searching look. “Almost ten years now,” he offers.

Roxie breaks off talking to the neighbor kids and shoots Stevie an accusing look. “Uncle Gino’s in the Army?”

“No,” Gino answers for her. “Corps’ mostly civilians. They do, we do infrastructure projects. Building stuff. They did the levees downtown.”

“You worked on that?” Roxie lights up. The levees would have been big news in the city when she was a kid. They’re half the reason their little island is still above water.

“No,” Kevin says. “He was long gone. But the mail still came then, he sent you postcards from all his little projects. When was the levee, what year was that, hm?” Roxie looks uncomfortable, but Jasmine puts in that she was in sixth grade. “Right! Big year. You were in that inter-city youth boxing thing, Jas. She made the quarter finals. Where were you that time, Eugenio?”

Gino isn’t sure what year Jasmine was in the sixth grade, or exactly how old she is now, but he can see Kevin waiting for him to ask. “Connecticut,” he says. “Coastal restoration.”

“Oh, yeah? How’d that work out for Connecticut?”

“C’mon, Kev,” says Stevie.

Gino says, “Not bad, last I heard. I’ve seen worse.”

“Yeah, me too,” Lenny says, and jerks his chin at the front window. Everyone laughs. Gino nods, which is close enough to laughing.

Another neighbor, a big guy whose name Gino can’t come up with, asks, “Yous guys got work planned down here?” And the woman next to him, his wife maybe, says, “Oh, they should put up boardwalks!” And somebody else, “We’ve been saying, there’s plenty of high enough ground for boardwalks to connect up to downtown. They gonna do that, Gino?”

“They don’t really tell me that kind of thing. I just keep the truck and everything running. I’m a, you know what I mean, a glorified mechanic.” He trails off, and his brother laughs.

“Please,” Stevie says. “They’re not gonna do shit. I mean, sorry, but you’re not, right? The levee was what, eight years back, and nothing since that. They gave up.”

Francesca, who had been quiet, eating, says, “They did. But that’s okay. Everyone is allowed to give up when they gotta.” From the tension in the room, it’s not a popular statement, but nobody argues her on it.

After a second, someone brings up the NBA finals, and how pissed Nato would have been that the Raptors made it this far again. And then his general grudge against Canadian teams in the NBA, and then his earnest incompetence on the court himself, as a young man. And then a picture is brought out of a shoebox, and it’s Gino, perhaps three years old, with a bowl cut and a look of childish ecstasy, up on his father’s shoulders, his father’s hands holding Gino’s chubby child-legs, Gino’s arms up at the end of an arc, a basketball in the air, suspended in the moment before it fell short of the net.

Gino ducks out to sit on the front stoop and finds a pack of Stevie’s cigarettes where he’s always left them, in the nook of a broken corner of the top step. He lights one just as the screen door creaks open and shut and his brother sucks his teeth at him and says, “Hey, asshole.” Gino hands him the one he’s lit and takes another for himself. They settle into their old arrangement, Gino facing the street on the middle step, Stevie behind him, leaning back against the railing, between the two of them a view of the narrow street and the intersection nearby, and of all the folks who would wander over to shoot the shit. Nobody wandering today, just the distant figures of other stoop-loiterers at another house. A familiar view, but uncanny.

“It’s so quiet around here,” Gino says. “It’s weird.”

“It’s been this quiet for, hell . . . years. You just weren’t around to notice.”

Gino grimaces, shakes his head. “I’m not gonna keep apologizing for living my own life.”

“Didn’t ask you to, I’m just saying.”

“Right. Sorry. Shouldn’t put words in your mouth.”

Stevie, never one to let discomfort sit for long, asks Gino how work is. “And you still seeing that girl? Tina? Trisha?”

“Tonya,” says Gino. “We called it quits. It’s the job. I’m somewhere for six, eight months, then a couple weeks of nothing, being a bum on her couch, then some other place, do it all over again. I like the work. Get a project, see it through, tie it up, I like that. But I think she got sick of the whole thing.”

“Condolences, man.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“So whose couch you bumming on between projects now?” Stevie asks. Gino shrugs.

“Just around, really. HQ has some temp housing, so I’m there mostly.”

“Bro, hold up, are you homeless right now?”

Gino shoves back against Stevie’s knee. “Fuck off, man, I don’t need a place is all.”

“Alright, alright! I was gonna say you could crash here, but being honest, I think I’d have a heart attack if you said yes.”

“And Kevin would fuckin’ kill you. Or me.”

Stevie grunts an agreement. “You wouldn’t stand a chance. He’s a biter, too.”

Gino sputters. “Come on, man, I don’t need to know that shit.” He hesitates, then says, “You guys don’t have to stay here either, you know.”

“Gino . . . .”

“Just saying, I know what it’s like to feel trapped here, but you’re not. You don’t have to stick around and watch it all sink, you know, I can help, we can pack up Ma, and . . . .”

Stevie cuts him off. “Come the fuck on, man. You think Ma’s leaving this house? You wanna pry her out with a crowbar? You’re gonna break her heart with that, and who’s gonna take care of her then, you?”

“I could help you get set up somewhere.”

“Get the fuck outta here with that, come on.”

“I’m just saying,” he says.

“I know what you’re saying. But be real, okay. Ma’s not going anywhere. And if Kevin and I leave, there’s no one to be with Ma—you’re not dropping everything and coming back. So yeah, you’re not trapped, because I am. And that’s not on you, I’m glad you’re out there doing your thing. You’re my little brother, you know, you’re a smart kid.”

“Stevie, I’m thirty-six.”

“See? You can count real high and everything.” Stevie laughs at his own joke. That loud, unselfconscious snorting that always makes Gino smile. “Jesus, listen to us. Like we’re in therapy or some shit.”

“I am, actually,” Gino offers.

“For real?”

“Yeah.” Stevie nudges Gino’s back with his foot, so he goes on. “Work has these folks on staff, and it’s free, so I figured might as well, y’know what I mean.”

“Huh. Nice of them, I guess. So what do yous talk about?” Gino cranes his neck around to glare at him. “What? I’ve never been to therapy before, I’m curious, come on.”

“It’s personal.”

“Alright, fine, don’t tell me anything.”

“It’s like AA, you know, it’s confidential.”

“How much confidential shit can you even have?”

“Aw c’mon, screw you, Stevie.”

He laughs again. “Kidding, I’m kidding.”

Gino finishes his cigarette and rummages in the pack for another. Offers Stevie one, lights them both. Overhead, the sun is behind gray clouds, and some sort of hawk or kite is making high, irregular circles. “He’s cool, the therapist they got,” Gino says. “He thought coming here for this was a good idea. He’s kind of a hardass, though, you know. Calls me on my bullshit.”

“That’s a big job, you’re full of bullshit.”

“Hilarious.”

“I know, right?” Stevie taps a little song on the top step with his fingertips. Inside the house, Roxie and Kevin are talking fast, back and forth, loud and happy enough. “So, go on,” Stevie says. “What kind of bullshit?”

Gino sighs. He gestures with his chin back at the front door. “This kind, mostly. First session we had, he gave it fifteen minutes before asking why I kept getting angry at myself for having feelings.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Yeah. I almost walked out and he was like, see? Right there, there it is again.” He shakes his head, smiles. “Bastard.”

“You still do that, though,” Stevie says, with all the self-assurance of someone who’d changed his diapers.

“I do. But I notice it now, which he says is good.”

Stevie blows smoke out the corner of his mouth and they watch the hawk drop out of sight somewhere over the marsh. “Is it? Good?”

“Nah, it sucks. Now I get angry about being angry.”

Stevie laughs so hard that both his daughters and his husband bang out through the front door to see what they’re missing, the three of them fitting themselves into Gino and Stevie’s stoop arrangement in a new configuration that makes him feel crowded, but at least not crowded out. The kids surround him on the steps, long teenage limbs getting everywhere. Kevin even offers him a bite of the slice of pie he carried out with him, and barely makes a face when Gino uses his fork.

Gino walks with his mom to his dad’s grave, about a five minute trip up the street. It was Kevin who pointedly herded his family and everyone else left at the house to clean things up and follow along afterwards, so Gino and his mom are alone together for the time being in the dim late afternoon, walking through sticky air and the droning noise of a neighbor’s household generator. It’s slow going, not because of any infirmity on Francesca’s part, but because she walks slowly, and always has. An infuriating trait in a city person, finally at home now that this part of the city has been cut off, made circumstantially provincial. Gino doesn’t mind meandering, but he’s not used to the sound of his mother not talking.

“Stevie’s girls look all grown up,” he says. She nods. She puts her hand on his arm and he folds it so her hand is tucked in the crook of his elbow and they walk like that, a dignified little procession.

“He’s a good father,” she says. “You still not seeing anyone?”

“Nah.”

“Would you tell me if you were?”

Gino ducks his head. “Probably.”

They come to the graveyard. Stevie had written to Gino about the place, and sent some pictures, but it’s more odd, more abrupt, to see it in person. What used to be a messy, six-way intersection in the middle of the neighborhood had become just so much useless space when the seasonal flooding stopped being seasonal, and residents were cut off from the closest gas station, now half an hour away over the water. Folks brought out the sledgehammers and tore it down to dirt. The original plan had been to till the soil and put in vegetable crops, but before they started planting, someone on 23rd St died, and all at once the residents of the newborn island realized they didn’t know what to do with their dead.

Cemeteries in South Philly had been exhumed and relocated long ago, well before most of the living started to leave. If the bereaved were so inclined, and could afford it, they’d ship their dead up to a plot in the northwest of the city, or even to the suburbs. Churches and mosques and synagogues pitched in, but most people, if their faith allowed, opted for cremation. The shore had been in flux their whole lives, and there was no assurance their kids wouldn’t have to dig up grandpa and ship his bones even further inland a couple decades down the line. Unfortunately for the remains of West Passyunk, however, when the water rose around them, no crematoriums remained on dry land. So they had the body of a young woman whose heart gave out, and a fresh field of open dirt. They planted her in it. And then the next death, and the next one. By the time Gino’s dad was buried here, he had plenty of company.

The graveyard has the long triangular shape of the old intersection, enclosed by a chain-link fence to keep out dogs and raccoons. The grass is clipped short, the regular sort of lawn grass instead of the mess of marsh grasses that have crept in everywhere else. White forget-me-nots are dotted in among the plots, and one corner of the yard is taken up by a huge mess of purple aster. The markers are pale wood, names and dates burned into them in a dark, neat script. Gino’s mom leads him to his dad’s plot, which is catching some late light.

Gino knows his father is dead. He’s known it for a year, but seeing a grave with his father’s name on it feels like coming down off a high wire—sickening, and sudden. He sits down in the grass, and after wiping some dust and grit off the marker, his mom sits down next to him.

“You should come visit him in the morning, too,” she says. “A lot of bees then, and bluebirds. I almost moved that feeder over here, the one he put out by the back door. But then they wouldn’t come to the house so much, and they come here already anyhow.”

Gino doesn’t trust himself to speak yet. He hadn’t known it would feel like this. He had hoped to avoid feeling like this, indefinitely. The finality of it, and the premonition that she would be gone soon enough too, and even Stevie one day, and that this gentle garden of the dead would flood with saltwater, and he wouldn’t get another chance to be brave enough to stick around. He thought he’d buried them for himself already by leaving, by not watching it happen. But they’re still here, and all he’d done was lose time that he’ll never recover, and let Stevie dig their dad’s grave all on his own. Gino’s squeezing his hands, one in the other, and his mom rests hers on top of them, a question. He shakes his head convulsively. “It’s fine, sorry. I’m fine, sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Alright,” she says. She squeezes his hand, rubs his back. “Alright, you go on.”

He knows what Stevie said, but he’s gotta ask, it’s clawing at him. “You and all them could come back with me,” Gino says. “I can take some more time off and find a place, doesn’t have to be that far, there’s a whole lot of Pennsylvania. We can get you outta here, it’s time to get outta here.”

“All of us?” She looks at him like he just spat in her face. “Your brother can make his own decisions. And you, baby boy I’m happy to see your face, but you can go anytime.” She nods at the grave. “But I’m not about to leave him. Don’t you ask me to.”

“I’m sorry, Ma.” For leaving, for coming back. For the moment a few days from now when he’ll leave again.

“That’s alright. It’s alright to have things you’re sorry for. Your dad lived a good long life, and he left still sorry for all sorts of things. You go on, be sorry. That’s okay.”

A trio of swallows have landed on the fence and are calling their clear, tittering trills into the dusk. Insects are flitting around, and the birds take turns launching themselves from the fence, diving in wild arcs, then coming back to rest. The other two waiting, chirrup-laughing, the insects droning on, oblivious to the game that’s been made of their fate.

“I couldn’t watch,” Gino says, leaning into his mom’s hand on his back. “I couldn’t watch it happen. Dad, the neighborhood.”

Her hand stills, then she pats him briskly, and stands. Stevie, Kevin, and the girls are coming through the gate and into the yard, chattering like birds. “Well, anytime you want to see us, we’ll be here,” his mom says. “Whether you’re watching or not.”