Here and Now in the Diluvian City by Brandon Forinash

During our lunch break we eat mall pizza and watch the east tower of the Dolce Vista apartments break apart and tumble into the sea. Cassy gasps. Miguel records on his phone.

The city is washing away.

Sometimes a building, sometimes a block. Every day the water encroaches and the city shrinks.

After lunch we go back to the store. Nico is lying on one of the mattresses in the back with her eyes closed and her pods in. I put my hand on her shoulder. I expect her to jump up, but she only opens her reddened eyes.

I wonder if she has been crying or smoking. I wonder what the difference would be. I wonder if anything makes a difference. The sandbags and the seawall and the city pumps.

“Before you ask,” Nico says, “Nobody’s come in.”

Which isn’t strange,  nobody has for a while.

Why buy something you can’t take with you?

The locals roam the mall like it’s muscle memory, and when they stop it is to stare into abandoned storefronts while they try to remember. Here had been, there used to be, wasn’t this where I found our granddaughter’s baptismal dress? She looked so— 

Just after closing, the floor manager tells us during the all-staff that we need to be selling more. If people aren’t buying, we need to be proactive. Go up to the customers, make conversation.

Beverly says this and we all look around at each other. “Listen,” she says—and I want to believe her, “I know what we’re up against, and I’m trying my best to keep as many of you on as I can.”

It’s a losing effort, holding onto things. The last sale I made was a customer shopping for his wife’s deathbed. The hospitals are understaffed, he told me, the pharmacies are mostly empty, and she won’t survive the journey out of the city with nowhere to go. They have an old bed, a hard thing, and he wanted to make her passing an nth less difficult,

if I could help?

At the end of the meeting, Beverly asks if anybody has anything to contribute. Cassy gets up and tells us that her immigration request was approved, she’d finally found a sponsor, a cousin.

The waves come in and we want out.

We are happy for her. We are all happy for her. We are all happy for her and want to be happy for her and tell ourselves that we will eventually be happy for her.

Everybody is looking for somewhere to go, the young and the old alike. The waves come in and what comes out of our parents’ mouths are dreams of relocating to Seaside or Santa Fe or maybe Park City. If they can only sell their seafront properties here

in the city

that is washing away.

After the meeting, I go up to Cassy. I am so happy for you, I say to her, and she looks pained. Nico comes by and suggests we celebrate/grieve her leaving.

It’s hard to grieve a thing before it’s gone. But maybe it’s more like, in this last age of humanity, we think of grief in terms of permission. We work the pumps. We stack sandbags at our doorsteps. We wall ourselves in and hope for the best.

Or at least not the worst.

After work we go out, Cassy and Miguel and Nico and I. Cassy holds my arm as we cross the street.

But when we get to our usual spot, we find it’s mostly underwater. We turn the corner and the sea is right there, at the end of the street, black and shimmering and unfeeling. Halfway up the block, the staff are going in and out of the basement bar carrying crates of booze over their head, glassware, whatever furniture they can salvage.

“What now?” Nico asks.

“I dunno, guys,” Cassy says and looks at me, “This feels like a sign.”

And she’s right. And maybe it’s for the best. I stack the thoughts. What would have happened anyway? One last memory of another wasted opportunity.

“Hold up a second,” Miguel says and goes up to one of the bartenders. They talk and Miguel gives them a ten, takes the plunge down into the bar, and comes out with half a bottle of whiskey and two bottles of wine.

“What do you say,” Miguel is soaked and smiling, “Let’s take the bar back to my place.”

I meet Cassy’s eyes.

The thing about living in a vanishing city, is that memory and imagination mingle.

I think about my last customer, the way he tried out each mattress. He checked the height, the relative ease or difficulty it took to get in and out, asked about the air flow, the heat, absorbency, and then closed his eyes while he imagined, I’m guessing, what it would be like for his wife to slowly die.

The city that was and the city that won’t be, for me, are both absolute certainties.

When I look at Cassy I know and remember that tonight might be the last time I see her.

The waves come in and the moment goes out.

Nico has a bottle of wine in one hand and pulls Cassy with the other. Miguel is already headed up the street. I watch a part of me fall into the sea, feel the water rushing in, feel everything uprooted, unsettled, awash.

And it doesn’t feel like loss. It feels like regret. Like I am just below the surface, an arms-length out of reach.

It takes a second, but I follow after them, I catch them up.

“Hey,” I say and take Cassy’s hand in mine.

She smiles and I pain blissfully.

Because the only way to lose something is to have it in the first place.

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BRANDON FORINASH — In 2011 Brandon received his Masters from the University of Texas in Austin. Afterwards he became a high school English teacher and Speech coach and put writing on the shelf. Coming back to it now, he has had recent publications in Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, Tiny Molecules, Maudlin House, among others and is forthcoming in BULL.

Art by KARISSA HO — Karissa is a writer and painter. Her work has appeared in Red Ogre Review, Humphrey Magazine, Radar Poetry, and JMWW, among others. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she studies English literature and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a very fast walker.