From luxury boats or the local news, the greater population of Tampa watched their city shift, then sink, Atlantis-style, and slide deep into the only darkness we do not know.
Hundreds of Tampa children watched in wonder and asked their mothers if octopuses were going to sleep in their beds. Hundreds of Tampa mothers didn’t know how to answer that question. Only one Tampa child asked her mother where they were going to live now. Her name was Judy. Judy’s mother finished her cigarette, flicked it into the ocean, and replied simply, “Somewhere else.”
And they did live somewhere else. Judy and her mother lived so many places else. They moved around every six months or so, flicking cigarettes into bodies of water all across the country.
A year after the Tampapocalypse, the people built another bridge over the newly-expanded Tampa Bay.
Ten years after the Tampapocalypse, Judy’s mother died, and Judy returned to Tampa Bay to live with her aunt. By this time, she was seventeen, and about to graduate from a school she’d been inside exactly twice.
One night, she asked her aunt if there was a community college she could attend (she’d been saving her money), and her aunt looked away from her black television screen and screeched—the first words Judy had ever heard her speak:
“There’s nothing for you in this world, kid! Stop looking forward! Nothing comes next!” And she crumpled up an empty can and threw it at Judy’s head.
Judy left.
“Nothing comes next?” Judy thought as she walked down the recently-newly-defined coast. Really?
Because as far as Judy could see—and she could see for miles out from here, without Tampa in the way—there was plenty that came next.
And what came next would be plenty.
Paige Blackburn is a young writer, poet, and college student from Illinois. When she is not working or attending class, she is reading a fantasy story, or writing one, or thinking about writing one. Her work has appeared in Unbroken Journal. You can find more of her poetry on Instagram @blackinkburnedpaiges.
photo courtesy of Julie Tupas