This morning, I notice a ripple in a lake in the swamp. I’m flying low through the trees when I notice; a mangrove’s gnarled finger points right at it. The ripple’s actually more of a shiver, so I don’t stop to look.

From above I can see everything, even the things I wish I couldn’t. Murky indigo pools lap at splotches of green, at boxy pastel constructions teetering along the frayed edges, which seem such tiny nests for such large, fleshy bodies. Humans. Clusters of them, wrinkled and lean, gather in these too-small places. They begin every day the same: emerge when the sun is already out, squawk at each other about nothing, cut back grass that continues to grow. Gables invite me to perch, but I keep my distance, resting instead on a pole strung up in tattered, sparking wires. Saltwater raps at the human’s backdoors, freshwater at their front. I wonder if they have flood insurance. I grow old. I fish.


Ten years ago, I noticed a shiver in a lake in the swamp and didn’t stop to look. I could forget until this morning. Breakfast was down to twenty-six minnows, all thrashing in a spiral swarm. A stranger, the first I’ve seen like me in a decade, landed on a branch nearby. Stranger stared as I gulped down what I could while keeping one eye alert. I screeched over a HI to no response. The air was still in a way that demands attention. I flew somewhere else.

It’s now late afternoon and I’m hungry. Stranger is still silent on that branch and there’s no quiver of a meal, so I make an excuse to return to the lake which is now more like the ocean. I tell those black-bellied whistlers always traveling in packs, The catch looks good over there, and they don’t ask questions. Circling overhead, I spot a few mullets leaping towards mosquitoes or away from something else. A lily quakes on the surface.

Overtaken by that familiar hunger, I hurl myself down, beak cutting through scum and algal film. I’m met with darkness. I plunge my head into the muffled, dull below.

Submerged, swollen toads and seaweed tangles dance around something I don’t want to see: a row of pink clapboard houses, hairy with verdant rot whose bloated roofs remain slightly out of reach. They balance on moss-coated stilts, wavering in leaked sunlight. Tendrils of green uncoil from cracks in windows. A door pushes open, slow against thick water.

Lungs hitching without oxygen, I wrench myself upwards and rip towards the sun, still shivering in the wet grip of the future.

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