This story, by Lily Smogor, is one of three winners of the 2025 Sustainability Writing Awards hosted by the Office of Sustainability. You can read more about Lily here.
Josey knew it was over three weeks before the government did. She’d woken to birdsong, a cardinal perched on her windowsill opposite the fraying screen, its flat black-marble eyes calling out to her from beyond some distant grave. She saw three more as she drove to work, their round red bodies darting into the corners of her vision whenever her eyes strayed from the road. When she saw her fifth as she clocked out for lunch, unwrapping a sandwich as she crouched on the curb behind the Rouses’ loading bay, she knew her mother had sent them to warn her, send her packing again, like she had back in San Francisco and Sarasota before that. Her familiarity with omens of death was as natural as the sun beating down on her back, hotter than any summer there had been back when people still wrote down the records.
Josey rocked back on her heels, the lettuce in her mouth turning to an antiseptic. She remembered her mother’s crepey hands resting on the handles of her hospital bed as she told Josey she’d never be alone, not really, not as long as there were cardinals. One had landed in the tree branch outside the hospice window. Oh Uncle Lonnie, her mother had cried, it’s been too long. Josey had looked it up once, the cardinal thing, sometime after her mother’s death but before the Internet went dark. Apparently it was a Native American thing, or Appalachian, or maybe it was Christian, but really nobody knew anymore. That was fine by Josey. When the fires and hurricanes had come, she’d been glad she listened to her mother.
It wasn’t going to be a blaze or a storm this time, that was for sure. Anyone could see that the concrete wall separating the Louisiana lowlands from the push of the sea was giving out. Saltwater, hurricanes, and time took their toll. Josey liked to walk home along the jogging path near the levee after work, watch the way the concrete crumbled at the corners and bleached along its wide parts. Some government scientists must have done the calculations, figured it would only take one more big storm to drown the bayous. No big deal, really, not for the bigwigs up in Burlington. All they had to do was push people back beyond the levees, sacrifice a couple thousand more acres of empty-enough land in favor of building up defenses further inland. It was the best option they had left once the melting permafrost undid any emissions-reduction progress from overseas. Josey wondered what it must have been like, the realization that even though a half-decade of forward progress and international cooperation had finally been possible, it had already been too late. The story reminded her of a department store cactus she’d once gotten as a Christmas gift: by the time Josey noticed it was sick, bugs had already eaten it from the inside out. She could bury the cactus next to the south-facing stilt of her home and mourn it even though she hadn’t had time to give it a name, but one couldn’t hold a funeral for all of Earth. Unless that’s what this was, is, will be.
The finality was a relief. Josey’s mother had been in university when the Venice Protocol was signed and all the world nations committed to building infrastructure to survive the apocalypse rather than preventing it. The stories she’d told about the aftermath— violent protests, suicide cults, even assassinations— had seemed a distant fiction by the time Josey heard them. She believed her mother, of course, she did. But for Josey’s generation, and that of her nieces and nephews, too, life went on. Schools stayed open, cars kept driving, football was still played on Sundays. People just moved inland, that was all. They moved inland, carried proof of citizenship, and were thankful they were born within the borders of a safer place. Josey wasn’t even sure children these days thought of the last one. Though the internet had been useless far before the systems finally crashed, she’d at least been lucky enough to know a world existed beyond her own when she was young. Maybe it would be better for them, the not knowing.
Josey remembered her mother watching clips of doomed revolutionaries on their television while her father slept. She wondered where they were now. Inland, probably. Or dead.
The evacuation orders came in threes. Hers were no different. The first came over the old radio that sat smothered under old bills and letters on her kitchen table. Josey thumbed through the papers as she sipped sugar-sludge coffee. The mortgage company kept sending payment notices and late fees, even though her sector had been written off the map for over a month. Free rent, neighbors would joke when these things happened. There was no use paying for a house with an expiration date, so most people just saved up for a deposit somewhere further north or west. In the early days, people would rush to move away as soon as a sector was slated for sacrifice. Now, most wait for a few weeks to a month, lessening the congestion on the roads and saving up for a better life. Her roommate back in San Francisco had thrown a dart at a map that got smaller and smaller every year when they’d had to leave. It had landed on Sioux Falls that time. Josey wondered if it was nice there, if the snow still came, if the stars could be seen over the lights from all the new homes.
The second warning came in the post office, spoken by the rosy-cheeked man at the counter. He was leaving on Saturday, he’d told her. Had three kids. They were going to his sister’s place in Chicago. You should get out soon, too, he’d told her, before the roads get too busy. That was the thing— relocations had become so commonplace that enough people dragged their feet till the very end, culminating in the worst rush-hour traffic west of Atlanta, Georgia. Josey had paid her postage and nodded. She had a sister in Chicago, too. If the mail trucks made it, she’d soon be receiving a package full of crisp bills and all the finest jewelry Josey had kept when their mother passed. She’d thought long and hard about adding a letter, but had decided against it in the end. She never did know what to say.
The third evacuation order wasn’t an order at all, not really. An old woman bumped into Josey at the grocery store, her basket clattering to the floor. Josey crouched to the floor, gathering the woman’s things.
“Where are you headed after all this?” The old woman’s voice was like burnt honey, cracked with age yet smooth in that slow, Southern way of speaking. In a fleeting thought, Josey wondered how long it would take for her accent to die out as people moved upwards and inland.
“Chicago,” Josey smiled as she handed the woman her basket. Three cans of tomato soup and two loaves of bread, all packed into neat rows that would be undone in a few moments at the register.
The old woman nodded. “I have a sister in Chicago.” They all did. “But I’m going to Colorado, myself. Figured it’s only fair that I get to die in a beautiful place. Besides, my son’s family has made a good life there. Better than anywhere else, these days, I’d reckon.”
Josey studied the old woman. Her skin was wrinkled and deeply tanned, her hands shook with the tremors people got from drinking the bad water, and yet her smile shone with hope and possibility, in whatever form it still existed. She looked old enough to remember a time before the future died, and yet Josey saw that dogged faith persist in the crinkled corners of her bright eyes. She looked like one of her mother’s doomed revolutionaries right then, only older, wiser, staring down the end as if giving up was a loaded gun.
Josey pitied the woman. She didn’t know she was already dead.
She’d been just like her once, maybe, thought staying ahead of the sacrifice and enjoying pretty places would fill the hole she didn’t know she’d inherited. She hadn’t wanted to leave San Francisco in the end, though. The sharp chill in the salt air, the fog rolling up the Embarcadero, and the soft warmth of her apartment kitchen had swaddled her soul, satiating any wanderlust her younger self might have been prone to. Leaving Sarasota had been almost as hard. Ending up in coastal Louisiana after that evacuation should have been a sign, but Josey hadn’t understood the depth of her exhaustion until the long line of cars began their ant-march inland. Josey was done leaving.
Storefronts shuttered for good in the following weeks, houses stood as empty sentinels over their empty streets. Josey stopped driving. She had nowhere to go. An attempt at a last stop at the gas station turned fruitless when the pumps didn’t start. The attendant had already fled, probably to find shelter with some sister in Chicago. Everyone had somewhere to go and someone to go to. Until they didn’t.
Josey chopped brushwood, clumsy, still a city woman all these years later. In the mornings, she walked the wetlands with a net and caught crayfish the way local kids had done it. She cooked her meals over a campfire once her gas went out, the smoke winding around the stilts of her house and curling off into the vastness of the sky. Her days were rudimentary, but her nights were sublime, stretched out on her roof staring into the twinkling mosaic that was an abandoned sky. The world was ending, yes, but she lived forever in the insensate expanse of distant stars. If Josey had had any doubts about staying behind, the distant thrum of the ocean and the uninterrupted blackness of the night sky restored her resolve. There was beauty to be found in the loss.
Josey wondered if she would live to see her street sink. She was no spring chicken, her dull hair shot through with gray, and countless sacrificed lands remained tenuously habitable for decades. When the government declared Washington was underwater and moved the capital to northern Vermont, there had barely been an inch of water in the streets during high tide. Not conducive to government work, sure, but hardly uninhabitable. At least back then. Josey didn’t know what it looked like now. Even where land remained, knowledge faded as the masses moved and stragglers were cut off from analog communications. Josey could live for forty more years, and as long as she remained in the sacrifice zone, her sister would know as much about her fate as she would the day the jewelry arrived at her doorstep, and Josey did not. She could be a drowned woman, a swamp hermit, a bayou witch, a venture capitalist of the reeds. She could be a ghost, a legend, a fading memory.
Or she could be what she was, a woman on her roof, feeling the patter of rain hasten on her cheeks as the clouds darkened above, wind howled in her ears, and her house groaned on its stilts.
She watched countless storms just like that. On her roof, the only soul left in her known world, Josey was invincible. The storms became a welcome reprieve from the heady summer heat. She almost forgot that each one carried danger. The wind, almost as much as the rain, threatened to sweep away the shifting wetland once held steady by the levees, now left to crumble under the battering, salty waves. Human ingenuity had made this basin stable, yet the ocean and the river called their sands home in the absence of engineering. Josey was no fool. She knew the Earth would have her way once again.
Josey knew the end was near three weeks before the hurricane made landfall. She’d woken to birdsong, a cardinal on her windowsill, and several more perched on her roof. “Mama,” she greeted them, “Uncle Lonnie.” Nonna Angesca, Nonna Paola, Nonno Antonio, Papa Dan. Her neighbor from San Francisco and the old man who walked his dog past her condo in Sarasota. Margie, her old boss. They were here to warn her, or maybe to see her off.
There was no news bulletin, no named storm, no list of missing persons. There was Josey and her cardinals, and then there wasn’t. Every year, thirty-or-so square miles slipped gently off into the silence. What was thirty-or-so more? The world went on in the blessed inland. Schools stayed open, cars kept driving, football was still played on Sundays. Somewhere, inventors still dreamed and toiled, legislators wrote desperate hopes into too-late laws, and artists elegized the past and future both. Josey’s sister raised her children in an apartment that never lacked laughter or warmth. Someday, someday in a near or far future, the cardinals would come to greet her too. But until that day, one flew alone between the folds of life and death and sorrow, just another ghost of the bayou.
Warm salt waves lapped gently over fallen stilts. It sounded like chatter, like tears, like farewell.