The list of terrible things grows like another storm strengthening in the Atlantic. We know enough to know what happens next, the traffic jams, sandbags. Even the meteorologists go quiet as the radar flashes models that engulf whole islands. We haven’t seen this before, they try to say. The list of terrible things eclipses previous records, a total blackout, the crickets carrying on at midday, since what else is there to do in the face of shadow. We warned you, the keepers of the list say. We saw the terrible things, put them down on paper. But it is dark now, windy, and the list slips from their grasp, swallows up the keepers, the crickets, the other small, desperate voices, until the silence isn’t silence at all but the white noise of drowning. A green-sky eyewall. By the time the water recedes, the list of terrible things writes itself. 
 

—Callista Buchen

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