When the end came, it came as resolutely as the sun, having as much choice, and giving as much warning as a predawn sky when there is just enough light for an imam to distinguish a black from white thread: the alba moment, when a convergence
of temperature and pressure morphs dew to fog, and day’s first gray warns lovers to part, the strengthening day quickening the rooster’s circadian rhythms till its crow erupts and pricks the ears of thieves and betrayers.
But few had been awake, not to this end. Not the imam. Not the lovers in their bed. Not the thief in his rounds. Even after Artic ice began to pool, mirroring the rosy fingers of dawn, lovers sighed and returned to the dream of their embrace; even as the bottoms of those ice lakes cracked, betrayers denied the dawn thrice, then four and more times, dismissing as Chicken Littles the roosters who warned of rising seas.
Relentlessly, having no more choice than water over a fall, trickles of ice melt grew into streams. Soon circular Niagara Falls of melting ice were pouring in on themselves, their thunderous torrents creating rivers beneath the ice caps as a current undermines a foundation and causes a seawall to collapse; the Arctic shelves broke apart far faster than anyone had anticipated, and it wasn’t until the sun was fully up that people noticed: the seas had in fact risen. Risen so much that lowlanders who had been crowing for highlanders to wake!—to see!—were migrating from the rising water; masses of refugees—the Bottom Billion—who once inhabited sea-swept coasts, now moved ever inland while those nations that remained dry installed fences and cameras and guards and tightened the mesh of their electronic screens as if that would help when in fact it only made the whole world flat. A monotonous drone was everywhere. Animals that couldn’t live everywhere withered. Malaria and poison ivies crept northward with kudzu and tropical insects proliferating in ever higher latitudes, the corrals built around refugees unable to keep out the insects that had begun to migrate upward, bringing with them diseases that had only been known in what had been the low, hot, and humid tropics….
Beeping…
The alarm on the humidifier that kept acting up went off again—and Gabe hit its reset button as lethargically as she might silence the alarm of her bedside clock. How odd it was to wake to a reality more Sci-Fi than her daydream.