Sinking

Cli-fi | Dystopian | Literary

Sep 15, 2024

Hello Story Voyagers, today’s edition brings you a short story about rain based on a dream—better said, a nightmare—I had many years ago.

My city is under water following a week of heavy rain, so I thought it was a good time to write this story.

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Mini-series announcement 📣

The next installment in our cli-fi series There Is Hope will be published as a seasonal mini-series in October.

This time, our journey on the Dust Road takes us to the Siberian Cooperatives, where we will learn more about the Taiga, the last forest on earth.

If you’re new to Story Voyager, you can start reading the series here.

Sinking

One day, it started to rain. The wet grey days turned into weeks and then months. The rivers swelled, flooding the land at first. We would play outside on warm days, running barefoot in the water. Everything was wet, but we didn’t care. At night, I listened to the sound of raindrops splattering on the rooftop of our house. Eventually, the entire land was covered in water, and we were forced to leave our homes and live on boats. My father and brother started to build a waterproof capsule. It was a round metal construction with hexagonal windows, grey like the sky and water surrounding us. The day we moved in, it felt like being locked alive in a coffin floating on a grave of water.

For a while, life went on. We followed birds to faraway mountains peaking out of the water. Every time, I was overwhelmed with the joy of stepping on firm ground, of feeling Earth’s crust under my feet. Some days, the sun came out, and the rain trickled down just a few drops at a time, barely there. I loved the feeling of lounging on a smooth rock, basking in the golden rays breaking the clouds, unveiling the serene blue of the sky. One day, we found a green twig, a willowy tender child of a spring that never came. I remember those last happy days haloed by sunlight like saints. I can almost taste their sweet juice, like ripe grapes or honeyed white wine, and they linger in my mouth. Like a ghost, I haunt those long-lost moments, willing them to return, but they never will.

Rain splashing against our windows, we watched the last mountain peak submerge in water. A lonely bird circled in the sky over the vast ocean covering the mountain until she was too exhausted to fly. She fell heavy from the sky and was swallowed by waves. I cried for a long time, my face pressed against the window as it continued to rain, the water now flowing over the edges of the world. There was nothing else to do in our claustrophobic little world, bobbing on an endless ocean on a lonely planet suspended in space and time in a dark and quiet universe.

As I record these last words, I watch through the hexagonal windows as our capsule slowly sinks to the bottom of the great grey ocean.

—The end

Authors’s notes

This short story is based on a dream I had many years ago, but I still remember vividly. I wrote this, seated at the tea table in my small city apartment, listening to the wind furiously blowing through the buildings. It’s been raining the whole week in Vienna. The wind started precisely one week ago, marking the end of a scorching hot and dry summer. Last Sunday, I went to a green area on the city’s outskirts where every single blade of grass on the ground and leaf in the trees was straw yellow and shriveled, burnt by the incessant heat and drought of the summer. One week later, the city is under water.

Public services such as trains and undergrounds have been temporarily closed, and some people can only access their homes via water. In a matter of days, we received half a year’s worth of rainfall.