Robin Whetstone

To get Hill City, you’ve got to get 2020. That was 5 years ago, the year everybody stopped pretending. The year we lost Miami. It was the first in a string of really big American cities to become unlivable. And the hilarious thing was, the ice caps didn’t even have to melt to sink the place. We’d all been sitting around waiting for that big catastrophe for years, for the not-so-far-off future of 4-plus degrees people were always carrying on about. But while we waited for the real show to start, a creeping, un-sexy disaster got Miami, a daily tide that was consistently a foot-and-a-half higher than normal. That’s all it took, and suddenly? Not a single Kardashian could be found on South Beach. Miami Beach Prepares for Extreme High Tides Just a foot and a half, and you couldn’t get to the restaurants and nightclubs and art galleries anymore, couldn’t wear your fabulous strappy sandals because the sewer pumps were backed up and leaking all the time. And nobody from Fort Lauderdal...

I stood on the porch with my mother that January of 2020 and watched the line of Red Cross buses idle on the hard road in front of our house, waiting for their turn to pull in to the Portico and discharge their passengers. The people sitting next to the windows on our side of the road looked at us as we stood there watching them, their dark faces blank. I raised my hand and waved to them. Nobody waved back. “I’ve seen this before,” said my mother, turning on her heel and striding across the porch towards our house’s open screen door. “This is not going to end well.” I followed her inside, trailing her into the kitchen. “Are you talking about the Haitians?” My mother was from North Florida and had lived in Miami a long time ago, back in the last century. She’d told me a lot about the place, about how, even back then, her apartment on Alton Road would flood with raw sewage every time it rained. About how someone had paid to have billboards put up in Little Havana and Overtown that ...