The sea, a notoriously impatient landlord, had finally come to collect. It started its eviction process politely, with damp suggestions under the doorframes and polite weeping from the window sills. Now, it had lost all subtlety and was making itself at home in the kitchen. Lio, at fifteen, had appointed himself the official Surveyor of Their Impending Doom. His tool was a long, algae-kissed stick he'd named "The Optimist," because each morning it revealed they had, optimistically, not drowned in their sleep.
This morning, The Optimist sank a full inch deeper than yesterday. The water, a soupy, reflective sheet, had claimed the entire kitchen floor. It swirled with a domestic melancholy, carrying stray crumbs and the ghost of last night's boiled seaweed in its gentle current. Their kitchen table stood on its last swollen legs, looking less like a piece of furniture and more like a very depressed manatee. Lio idly pushed a floating potato with his toe, watching it embark on a grand voyage toward the stove.
His father, Ira, was at the center of this miniature ocean, conducting the symphony of their ruin. Before the world had developed its rhythmic, geographical hiccups, Ira had been a mapmaker—a respected one. Now he was more of a speculative artist, charting a reality that evaporated as he drew it. His priceless, antique maps were spread across the table, their vellum skins bubbling with moisture. He wasn't just mapping the encroaching water; he was naming it.
"The Greater Inlet of Tuesday has breached the pantry," he announced to no one in particular, his charcoal stick carving a furious new line on a soaked piece of parchment. "And the Bay of Utter Despair is now lapping at the leg of my chair. It's moving faster." He glared at the map as if it had personally betrayed him. "We have to leave. Today."
From her perch on a mostly-dry countertop, nine-year-old Mina gave her invisible companion a thoughtful look. "He says the floor is thirsty," she reported, her voice carrying with unnerving clarity over the drip-drip-drip from the ceiling. "He also says not to worry about the potato, it will find its way. He knew it in a past life."
Lio fought the urge to ask if the ghost had also known the potato's hopes and dreams. He was never sure who Mina was talking to—a ghost, a god, or a particularly chatty hallucination born of stress and malnutrition. Whatever it was, it had terrible timing.
Their mother, Sera, provided the scene's silent, tragic anchor. She stood by the sink, methodically scrubbing a single, grime-caked plate with a handful of sand. The water eddied around her ankles, but she seemed to have reached a separate peace with it. Her focus on that plate was absolute, a monastic devotion to a single, clean surface in a world dissolving into filth. It was, Lio thought, her own quiet, ceramic form of madness. She scrubbed as if the fate of the universe depended on this one plate being ready for a dinner they would never eat.
"I had a dream," Lio said, the words cutting through the tense absurdity.
Ira stopped his frantic cartography. Sera's scrubbing slowed.
"I dreamed I was swimming right here," Lio explained, gesturing to the murky water sloshing around his father's feet. "But the house was already at the bottom of the sea. It was quiet. The windows were just black squares. And your maps," he looked at his father, "they were like pale, dead fish, just floating past my face." The image was so clear he could still feel the phantom cold.
Mina considered this. "Was I there?"
"No," Lio said. "You weren't."
"He says that's because I was visiting a friend," she explained calmly.
The sheer, matter-of-fact insanity of it all hung in the air. Ira slammed his charcoal stick down on the table, splashing grey water. "That's it! We're going."
Sera finally stopped scrubbing. She placed the impossibly clean plate on a high shelf, a tiny monument to her efforts. She turned, her eyes finding Ira's with a look of profound weariness, as if she'd had this exact conversation a dozen times before.
"The Rising Lands, then," she stated, her tone as flat and lifeless as the fog outside. One might use the same voice to agree on a brand of canned beans.
"Yes," Ira boomed, his despair instantly replaced with a manic, purposeful energy. "To the Rising Lands!" He began stuffing his wet, useless maps into a leather satchel, a madman packing his delusions for a road trip.
As they scrambled to gather what little they had left, Lio watched his father carefully roll up and protect a framed map of the world as it had been fifty years ago—a completely pointless, nostalgic artifact. His mother, meanwhile, packed three mismatched shoes and a single tin of peaches.
Lio looked over at his sister. Mina had moved to the fogged-up windowpane and was drawing in the condensation. It was a child's simple sketch: a crooked house, sinking beneath a wavy line. She paused, then added four stick figures inside the house, their arms reaching up.
She leaned close to the glass, her breath creating a new circle of fog, and whispered to her reflection, or to the phantom standing beside it, a single, weary word.
"Again."