I live in a town full of rain, a liquid city. We’ve got water up to our gills and I’m having trouble breathing. The bilge-pumps are struggling and the overflows are overflowing — hell, even the air is wet. Before today it rained for thirty-three consecutive days and the water level went up eight inches. The Stilt was cramped enough already, and now the water’s pushing up and we’re pushing out. The Fixers are getting ready to build another level and move us all upstairs again.
All this water, and we can’t drink any of it. We’re down to two cups of clean a day. It’s probably a good thing. Sal joked the other day that one misplaced piss and we might all be swimming. The clean pipe which runs from the purifiers up to the kitchen is beginning to taste no different to the rest of it. The water in the showers is thick and coloured and you feel cleaner without it. After the rain, everything stinks. The purifiers can only do so much. The food situation though is just about stable. There are seaweed crops. we eat fish substitute Wall Mount Cabinet.
As of last week, downstairs became submarine. It’s like someone drowned my youth, because we were brought up down there. That was back when there were still children allowed on the Stilt, before all of that was taken over to the Dries. I was eleven then. A big transport arrived and mothers and children made a mass exodus. Except for me, because my mother was dead and I was sick and didn’t qualify. They left me to see if I’d make it. I tell myself that maybe now that I have, someone will come back. They never do, though. Soon after that the travel permits came in, and no one goes now who isn’t taken. People arrive, and are put to work. But they never leave, no one gets permits now Dream beauty pro hard sell.

Once when the water was lower, before the Overboards were even built, I sat on a step and watched the last swan anyone here ever saw, floating in the water like a long-necked lily, an opening fist of a flower. Then the thunderous snap of its wings in take-off. The immense clean span of its flight. Maybe it’s gotten bigger as I remember it, but it was huge. Even then it looked like a creature from myth. No one dared kill it, not for food dermes.