Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

Sam woke abruptly, heart pounding in the now daily moment of panic between sleep and awake when she couldn’t remember when or where she was. 

The pretty floral top sheet that she had found at the goodwill a week before, taken home and washed in washing soda and hot water, was wrapped around her right leg. A jumbled pile of blankets lay half on her, half off the bed. Sweat soaked her tee shirt despite the chilly apartment, making the wet cotton shirt cling uncomfortably to her shoulders and lower back. Her winter beanie was pulled down low, hiding her eyes, wet from the sweat at the nape of her neck.

Sam tugged her hat up over one eye, peeking at the window through the blinds. It was still dark outside. She checked the watch that she had started wearing to bed. She’d taken recently to sleeping in her clothes. 

Big hand on the 7, little hand on the 3 - three thirty five in the very early morning. That’s the fourth night in a row, Sam thought. 

She’d been having the same nightmare every night for nearly a month, sometimes many times in the same night if she managed to fall back asleep. 

Same nightmare, different variations. Rain and rising water. This time she had been in a flooding, nineteen-eighties style mall. 

Sam disentangled herself from the sheet and blankets and trudged to the kitchen to start the coffee. Lavender, her cat, jumped onto the breakfast table, meowing loudly for breakfast. Sam chatted sleepily with Lavender, as the coffee machine began to burble in the background. She refilled Lavender’s bowl with dry cat food and placed the wet food beside it as Lavender headbutted her arm appreciatively. 

Sam poured coffee and cream into a mug then brought it with her to the table. She took a big sip and watched as Lavender ate her breakfast. The tense knot of emotions that had wedged itself beneath her breastbone since she was fired earlier this week felt like it was pressing into her heart. The emotions shifted throughout the day, but this early in the morning it was a confusing mixture of relief and fear pressing into her. 

Her teaching position had been eliminated due to the storm. That was the official reason. That’s what her paperwork said. Position eliminated due to federally recognized natural disaster. Sam closed her eyes and saw the red-brown water crashing through her neighbor’s backyards across the road from her apartment. 

She saw the two hundred and fifty year old oak tree toppled over, pulled up by the roots, tangled in electrical wire and fallen into the roof of the building where her classroom had been. 

She heard the national guard helicopters flying over, saw the soldiers in the Walmart garden center, saw the tractor trailers in the community soccer field crushed and thrown about, heard the chainsaws revving in every direction as neighbors cleared debris. Remembered the stories. 

Sam took a deep breath. She shook herself as if shaking her head would dislodge her thoughts. 

The unemployment insurance would cover most of her rent and bills for a few months while she looked for work. She had applied to twenty-seven remote writing internships, copywriting positions, and editorial assistant positions in the past three weeks. She knew because she had counted yesterday, at her friend’s workshop where she had been doing her grad school work for the teacher education program she was enrolled in, where she had been working on her resume and job applications because she had disconnected her eighty-dollar-a-month internet last week. 

“What do you think will happen with the local economy?” her friend Terra had wondered yesterday, as they drove from the workshop to Terra’s RV. Terra’s grey 2015 Honda had been making a funny noise going up the hills for the last two days, Terra had said, and then hoped aloud that it wasn’t the transmission.

“Will they rebuild the restaurants that got washed away? Are they going to rebuild in the same places that flooded? How can they? The floodplains have changed. They’re saying it was a five hundred year weather event. But it wasn’t. Because of climate change. It’s going to keep happening. Maybe not exactly the same, but the storms are worse,” Terra said. 

“The people who left after the storm and moved here because they thought they’d be safe from climate change aren’t going to come back. People were moving here because they thought it’s safe in the mountains,” Sam said. 

“Oh, man. I didn’t even think about that.” Terra said, as they crested a hill and the mountains came back into view, “The climate refugees. No… It’s not safe here, either.” 

Sam opened her eyes, feeling the warmth of the coffee mug in her hands. The mug had a picture of Baby Yoda on one side and the words May the Force Be With You on the other. Every year for her birthday, Sam’s sister gives her something Star Wars related. It had started seven years ago with an R2-D2 measuring spoon set and escalated last birthday to a Darth Vader pancake maker. 

Lavender wound herself around Sam’s legs, purring. Sam picked up Lavender and held the cat in her lap. Lavender squirmed immediately, twisting out of Sam’s hands and leaping to the hardwood floor. 

Sam tapped in the code to her phone, typed news into the web search bar and scrolled through the top stories. 

Incoming Administration Vows to Dismantle the Department of Education read the second headline from the top. Sam blinked at it and sucked in a hard lungful of air. 

“Dismantle…” Sam murmured to herself, staring unfocused at the screen. 

She closed the web browser, opened her text messages, and sent a gif of a person in a dinosaur suit to her friend group chat. A few minutes later, a haha bubble popped up on the gif. A gif of a strutting crow in a sweater followed. A Dungeons and Dragons meme about predictive text set off a several hours long chain of texts:

CS: What’s the deal with [ pickles ] 

AW: I like the concept of [fermenting dregs]

JJ: oh wow [that’s awesome news and I think I have a lot of work to do]

EH: I’m [going to be a little late] lol lol lol

And so on. 

“Don’t go on the internet,” Sam’s friend April told her at dinner that night, when Sam told her that she read the news and saw the future that she had worked for disappear before her eyes. 

“No,” April’s partner said. “Got to stay off the internet.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed, staring at her plate, “There’s nothing but trouble on the internet.”