Our island is sinking.
 
Each day, the newspaper prints a diagram representing our shoreline. The circle gets tighter and tighter, like coffee rings left behind in a dirty cup. It won’t be long until the ocean swallows us in one bitter gulp, we’re told.
 
“We need to grow up, not out,” the mayor says on TV.
 
This mayor descends from a long line of mayors, all in the family. We loathed his brother and his father, but our parents have vague memories of loving his grandfather, or at least, wanting to have a beer with him. Though the current mayor is the most attractive to date, the half-life of morality bears its thinnest trace elements in his smooth, pale face. His mouth will say anything and he always looks slightly wet.
 
“Let’s invest with conviction in the basics, so everyone has what they need to not only survive, but thrive,” he says, gesturing with his thumb draped over a curled hand. We know this to be a political invention — pointing without accusation, fist-pumping without aggression — and yet here we are. Like all good compromises, we’d rather champion an idiot gesture than admit we’re wrong, that there’s a better solution out there.
 
Now, a squirrely little scientist is talking instead. Unlike the mayor, he has not ingested a lifetime of media training, and it shows. He delivers bad news with the deftness of a falling piano.
 
“The mega-plastics that used to define our beaches and shorelines are breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces, which cannot support weight,” he says. “We need to gather these microplastics and bring them to the refinery where they can be upcycled and used to, as the mayor suggests, grow up, not out.”
 
The island wasn’t always like this. At its peak, when the mayor’s grandfather was in charge, we were twice the size of Texas. Back then, we measured everything in terms of Texas; that’s how much abundance there was. The future felt technicolor and indestructible, something we could hold in our hands, like a bouncy ball.
 
“A fishing line takes 600 years to degrade,” our fathers would tell us, the creases in their brows all shiny and bunched up like cling wrap, while they baited the hook, cast the pole, gutted the trout, tossed the head. “How lucky you are to have everything you need, forever and ever.”
 
Seems like life changes overnight. We’re all given these tools, a bit like pool skimmers, that track how much debris we gather. In order to ensure everyone pulls their own weight, it’s recommended we all literally pull in our own weight. That’s about 5,500 CDs or one refrigerator.
 
We skim egg timers, tape measures, prescription bottles, chip clips, inhalers. We skim toothbrushes, baby bottles, cell phones, lighters, pens. In a show of moral support, even the mayor’s family is here, helicoptered in from the mainland. Within 15 minutes of skimming, his large adult sons find 400 pounds of plastic — their exact combined weight — in the stomach of a dead whale. They pull out knotted ropes of fluorescent carrier bags hand over hand, and it keeps coming, like a magic trick. The bags say things like:
 
THANK YOU
THANK YOU
THANK YOU.
 
After the photoshoot, the sons return to the continent.
 
With the future uncertain, many of us are reconsidering having children.
 
“You know when you finish a coffee and you’re confronted with three color-coded bins,” we say. “And suddenly, it’s like you’re holding a grenade and unless you dismantle the lid, sleeve, and cup into the proper receptacles, the whole thing will blow your hand off?”
 
“I want to bring my children into a world they can throw away without worry.”
 
“We’re skimming packing peanuts while a company who once tried to rebrand its initials as Beyond Petroleum discharges five million barrels of crude oil into the ocean with the same disposable indifference as cumming into a sock,” we say.
 
“How can we be sinking if there’s the exact amount of matter on Earth as there’s ever been?”
 
“There’s no such thing as virgin plastic,” we say. “There’s no such thing as virgin anything.”
 
“Except maybe the scientist,” we say, and the ripple of our laughter moves through the crowd as we wade through the chemical sludge.
 
 
 
The science is still out. And yet, we want to send the right message about our island. Things can be beautiful here. Any floating object in the ocean tends to attract life. We’re no exception. The sunsets, when the light bounces off the ghostly fibers of wood pulp in the estuary. The financial district, with every skyscraper boasting a living wall, all of downtown dripping and breathing together. The sudsy biofilm of a rainbow in every gutter as the outer suburbs wash their SUVs. And look: a colony of limpets suction-cupped to a diving mask, washed ashore on the beach. They’ve found a way. We can, too.
 
A heavy plume hangs over the refinery where debris is melted down into long beams of durable plastic composite. The factory runs day and night, churning out scaffolding. Neighborhoods near the shrinking coast apply for housing in the new urban developments. There’s a waitlist, but the most vulnerable populations will be first in line, we’re told.
 
The mayor’s back on TV. He adjusts the recycling pin on his lapel before vaulting into his talking points.
 
“The future is not an abstract idea; it is a place we must plan for and build, from the ground up, together,” he says, all teeth and gums. “I believe in the seismic power of small shifts. I believe in you.”
 
Off-camera, the mayor’s speechwriter mouths along, pointing with his thumb on the word you.
 
“We must double the daily yield,” the scientist is now saying, hunched with a mounting anxiety that puts his shoulders above his ears. Despite being born and raised on the island, the scientist is less trusted than the mayor, new polling suggests. “Every person, twice your weight, every day.”
 
The diagram in the newspaper has gotten too small to see, so they’ve changed the scale. This leads some to believe things have gotten better since the shape is now bigger. That’s simple math. New words enter our vocabulary and we say them with confidence, like we’ve always said them. A gyre of marine litter. A nurdle of terrestrial runoff.
 
Our mothers phone and say things like, “There was a handsome priest on daytime TV giving advice and he said the meaning of life is a baton, to solve it is to pass it on.”
 
When we ask what that means, our mothers say, “It means I don’t care what the scientist says, I want to kiss grandchildren before I’m buried at sea.”
 
Every day we lift the horrible rock. That’s a joke to lift the mood. It’s not so bad. During the day, we skim discarded fishing gear, traps, and nets from the thin plastic soup. Someone finds an inflatable pool, someone finds a floppy disk. All those weird textures and harsh angles are boiled down into something smooth, strong, solid. If you put everything we’ve reclaimed so far in a straight line, it would stretch across 500 football fields, we’re told. We love measuring things in football fields.
 
Those who can’t skim, sort items at the refinery. Sorters are held in the highest regard. Only they are capable of deciphering the complex and archaic numbering system printed in translucent, raised text, like a scar, on the bottom of each object. While we would never question their expertise, it seems almost every item ends up in the same industrial shredder.
 
In the evening, we boil salted water for pasta and pick static lint from the dryer vent and watch sitcoms with laugh tracks from 20 years ago precisely because we’ve seen them before, we know what’s coming next, and we know it can’t hurt us. The new normal is similar to the old one in that we keep going. No matter what, we keep going.
 
 
 
It should be said: not everyone believes our island is sinking. There’s an AM radio host with a voice like a garbage disposal that has managed to win the hearts of half the island.
 
“Scientists believe our island is sinking,” he says, his voice all gravel and ash. “But pause for a second and think about that. Science never asks us to believe in anything. Just the opposite. Science is a never-ending attack on settled belief, on faith, on what we imagine we know, on what we assume. Science doesn’t tell us what’s true. Science shows us what’s true. It demands proof, not faith. So, where is the proof?”
 
On the news, we watch footage of a sinkhole swallowing a children’s hospital. The building is there and then it’s not, as if falling through a trapdoor. When pressed about this on air, the radio host emits a deep, lawnmower laugh. “The scientist used to work at the hospital, he’s on the board, he’s a donor. Follow the money.”
 
Some of us are pregnant, despite everything.
 
“Try not to eat fish,” the doctors say. “If it’s in the water, it’s in the fish, in you, in the baby.”
 
We pin ultrasounds with blocky, alphabet magnets to the fridge and think, wow, everything is connected.
 
Life on the mainland is even worse, we’re told. There’s not enough fresh water. There are too many people. There are ancient viruses trapped inside of organisms in the arctic shelf which are now resurfacing due to climate change, jesus christ. The mayor’s great-grandfather was good and clever for thinking to inhabit these islands. Contrary to critics, the mayor’s family is brave and selfless for living on the mainland without us. We’re lucky to be in this position at all.
 
The new buildings downtown have a real shape to them. The scaffolding, a gorgeous composite of mixed materials and plasticizers, looks shiny and infinite, like if you boiled down a mirror. It just goes up and up. It feels like the future. It feels like it could hold the whole island. Maybe it can.
 
Often, we wonder about the mayor’s private life. He is so composed on TV. All his sentences start with let me be clear which makes us feel so safe, we don’t even need to hear the ends. But surely, even a man of his stature must still succumb to the same human embarrassments as the rest of us?
 
No one has to wonder about the scientist’s private life because every night he is on one talk show or another. He talks fast and points with his index fingers and never stops to say let me be clear. The talk show host asks, “Are there enough materials to keep building?” and the scientist says, “There is more plastic than fish in the ocean, so yes,” before continuing on to say the problem isn’t supply, it’s execution. Words keep coming out of the scientist, but they have no weight. The sounds float, buoyant and bleary, too high above our heads to make meaning from. Looking straight at the sentence there is more plastic than fish in the ocean is impossible, we can only see its faint outline from down here. No, we will drown looking up at the gradient of more plastic than fish before ever understanding its true shape or structure. Right before the commercial break, the scientist throws us a lifeline. “By weight, not number.” Oh, we think. Oh.
 
 
 
There’s a problem down at the refinery. The machines can’t handle this level of production. The smelters are overworked. Everything is operating at a net loss. The numbers don’t add up. Not only does our current model of recycling not work, it seems it will never work, was never going to work, we’re told. Leaked footage on the news shows less-than-ideal working conditions: people are wearing oversized garbage bags and hockey masks instead of protective gear; they’re tossing coat hangers and dishwashers into molten vats with their bare hands; they’re skipping breaks and pissing in Styrofoam cups to meet their quotas; and worst of all, their floor managers aren’t sharing the videos we’ve been posting online where we all clap at the same time as if to say, hey, don’t you forget, we’re all in this together, man.
 
Our island is draped in scaffolding and cranes. Downtown looks like it was drawn by a toddler — big rectangular outlines where a city should be. We hope we live to see it filled in.
 
When our children are born, they look like a miracle. Ten fingers, ten toes, and the rest. We can’t believe it. Every afternoon, we read them picture books where animals are the hero, and every night, serve them little pieces of chicken molded, breaded, and fried into the shape of a five-point star. The kids are incredible. They make it easier to be hopeful about the future. They know absolutely everything about dinosaurs. We buy our little ones figurines of velociraptors and they ask us where they all went.
 
“Well, dinosaurs turned into fossils, into crude oil, into plastic, into toy dinosaurs,” we say. “So, in a sense, they didn’t go anywhere, little bud.”
 
The receding shore has eaten many of our favorite haunts. There used to be a gift shop along the coastal highway that sold license plates with our names on them, bumper stickers, and individually wrapped pieces of salt water taffy in massive barrels you could stick your whole arm into without reaching the bottom. Not only that, the gift shop itself was in the shape of a fish — a blue tang with a big, dilated eye that followed you no matter which direction you were driving past. As teens, it was an easy place to start the night. Meet at the tang and figure it out from there. And so, in that small-town landmark kind of way, whether it was talking through a mouthful of peanut butter taffy as a kid, getting a twitchy handjob in the parking lot as an adolescent, or buying a piece of personalized marine kitsch for our own babbling children, we all loved the gift shop. The video clip of the building sliding ass-backward into the tide with an undignified splash was easy fodder for late-night television — but we didn’t find it funny. No, there are simply some things we won’t be able to rebuild in the new normal.
 
All the sub-aquatic construction work is heating the surrounding waters, we’re told. It’s taking a toll on marine life. You wouldn’t think it’d work this way, but apparently, all the things that thrive in pleasant, warm currents are dead-eyed, vampiric creatures that drain the life from everything around them. We’ve got nothing but jellyfish floating aimlessly as lost balloons, squid darting around like syringes, purple inkblots of sea urchins staining the kelp beds. Bleached coral can be beautiful if you don’t think about it too hard, so we don’t.
 
 
 
The mayor is up for reelection. As part of his campaigning, he visits the only completed new building downtown. The camera angles are tight as he’s given the tour by the foreman, and we glean that anything not directly in frame is marred by live-wiring or the exposed, cotton candy membrane of wall insulation.
 
“The challenges we seek to address are intertwined and far-reaching,” the mayor says, wearing a hardhat in a way that is so unnatural, so ill-fitting, he might as well be wearing a hat made of tropical fruit. “But so are the solutions.”
 
The mayor is aging. They say it does that to you, power. Perhaps it is because he is less handsome, or perhaps it is because 500,000 people have died since he has been elected, but his numbers are falling. His catchphrases become more obtuse and harder to chant. Grow up, not out was simple enough for a dog to bark. What is he saying now? We need a little more time to prove the efficacy of our plan. Good luck teaching that to a greyhound.
 
After a failed effort to unionize, half the factory workers quit en masse. Construction slows to a crawl. There simply aren’t enough hands, we’re told. Online, we browse the computer-generated interiors of the proposed developments. Because all the furniture has been photoshopped in, with each item having a slightly different scale, perspective, and drop shadow, the apartments feel more like funhouses than homes. They use the same fake painting in every room: a grainy JPEG of persimmons spilling out of a tote bag. We swipe through slideshows until we’re too nauseated to pretend we might live in places we could never afford anyway.
 
A fringe political group has suggested the only way forward is to stop investing in this island, and instead, build an entirely new home. An island off an island off an island. Their leader is young, unconventional, he swears on TV, he has facial hair.
 
“Let me be clear,” he says. “The current mayor suggests recycling because he himself is a recycled idea. We need net-new proposals to create a future worthy of the people we care about most — a place of beauty and belonging, for all.”
 
An attractive element of the candidate’s proposal is that we could all stop skimming, which is probably good, because nascent clinical trials show that all this time spent wading, melting, and breathing in plastic might not be good for us. Chemicals can leach out of containers and into our softer parts, we read in a viral article that is soon taken offline by the same board of directors that oversees both the social media company and the production of plastic skimmers.
 
A somewhat less attractive element of the candidate’s proposal is the risk.
 
“What’s the fastest way to build a new island?” he asks, holding our attention like a Fabergé egg. “That’s right, a goddamn volcano,” he says, though no one was thinking that.
 
Instead of trying to build something from nothing, we should lean into the power of the Earth to do what it’s been doing for 4.5 billion years: keep going. Our island has natural resources; let’s use them. He recommends that we start depositing all of our debris — not only plastic, but our trash, food scraps, glass, it honestly doesn’t matter — straight into the mouth of the volcano. When the mountain erupts, it will convert our materials down into virgin, usable land, no sorting required.
 
The skimmers, sorters, and factory workers love this idea. The scientist has questions, of course.
 
“Even if we manage to trigger a volcanic eruption, how can we control where the molten rock is spat out?” the scientist asks, his hair windswept like a dandelion.
 
“A volcano is what I like to call an everything machine,” the candidate says, stroking his beard. “It solves whatever you put into it, like a black hole, or the internet.”
 
The newspaper has stopped reporting on the size of the island. Not because things have gotten better, but because in the pivot to video, they had to let their field reporters go. We’re no longer certain about the exact shape of our borders, – but we do have incredible drone coverage of the volcano, which eats whatever we throw into it with a primordial hunger. The views on the live stream speak for themselves.
 
Now that our children are grown, it’s impossible to regret them, how could we? Every morning we ask them what they dreamt about and every morning they say the same thing: animals, animals, animals. We take them on slow, meandering walks through the floating gardens and urban aviaries, around the hydraulic dams and turbine fields. Everything hums and we hum along with it. The only thing more beautiful than a sunset is watching your kid watch a sunset, we text our parents. It feels like we’re living twice.
 
“City birds are louder than country ones because they have to sing over the traffic,” we say, throwing balls of white bread into a pond, where they plop and fizz until they’re pecked apart.
 
“Is that good or bad?” our kids ask.
 
“Good,” we say. “It means they’ve found a way.”
 
Before bedtime, we whisper this is a country bird into their ears. Then, flapping our arms wide, we yell AND THIS IS A CITY BIRD! while chasing them around the house. They laugh and scream and it feels like someone has rung the bell inside our hearts with a delicate little mallet. They keep laughing and it keeps ringing, pure and true.
 
A small tributary swells into a furious river that splits our landmass vertically. The island is now divided like a brain: the refineries and new developments in the left hemisphere, the volcano and landfills in the right. The mayor and his opposition focus their campaigning on the part of the brain they think they can win over. Our resources are dwindling, our attention is shot, no one knows where to expend their time or energy. Should we be skimming plastic, melting trash, investing in this future, or building a new one? Should we keep having children? Is that acid rain? You’re not voting for him, are you? We don’t take sides so much as we cling on to what keeps us afloat.
 
 
 
In the foothills near the volcano, locals are reporting low-level tremors. They arrive at the same time every night, in short buzzes, like a phone on vibrate. It’s the future calling. The ground warms and fissures beneath our feet. At night, the smoke above the volcano merges with the plumes above the refinery to form an eerie weather system. With the yolk of a full moon behind a curtain of cloud, the whole mess looks like a poached egg.
 
The election is tomorrow. Our fathers call and say things like, “Politics is show business for ugly people,” which they’ve been saying every year since they stopped reading the news. They can’t keep up with all the new language: the fracking and the geothermals and all the little semantics between big bang and heat death. “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us that there are two parties,” they say, which has the linguistic momentum to be something clever, but peters out when they get sidetracked and tell us all about the new dash cam they’ve installed. “Get a load of this,” our fathers say, sharing their screen to show us the minor traffic infractions they’ve witnessed on the crumbling coastal highway. “Nothing gets past me now. It’s like having a lawyer in the passenger seat.”
 
Online, it feels like the opposition candidate is going to win in a landslide. All we see are viral posts saying it’s high time for new thinking, for fresh blood, for innovative ideas. After all, the current mayor is a scarecrow stuffed with empty promises. His large adult sons are bug-eyed sea monkeys who’ve never worked a day in their lives. What do we have to show for all our skimming and sacrificing? Nothing but sites of scaffolding and a bay of floating graves.
 
We try to put our children to bed early, but they sense the static cling of anxiety in the air and conduct it through electric tantrums that last for hours. We give them a dozen glowing screens but nothing quells them. When they finally, finally exhaust themselves, we carry them off, their cheeks salty with dried tears, little bodies heavy with sleep and think, is this the best part? Tucking the loose hairs behind their pink ears, we wonder is it easiest to love you when you’re closest to death?
 
The scientist makes his final plea before the results come in.
 
“Whatever happens, I want everyone to understand there is no simple way out,” he says, looking relaxed for the first time. “We can’t move forward without a shared understanding of the truth. Our island is sinking. That’s something you can hold on to.”
 
And: the mayor wins by a mile. He is on TV again, flanked by his gargoyle sons.
 
“They’ve found cans of spam in the most remote and inaccessible places on the planet,” he says, pumping his limp-fish-of-a hand. “French Polynesia. The Pyrenees. Some call Everest the world’s highest trash can. Which is to say: there is potential all around us. We are makers and remakers. We are new and renewers. We have everything we need to keep running. And that’s why I ran. To keep us running.”
 
Does the world feel different when our children wake up? A construction crane dips its neck to the ground like some great grazing beast, the smell of sulfur thick in its machinery. Elsewhere, craters near the coast glow and bubble. Low-tide recedes to reveal a sheet of jellyfish splayed out on the sand. An object in motion stays in motion, we’re told. Why would we stop now?