The children woke coughing. Smoke hung above their beds, so they dropped beneath it, dressed lying down. In neighbouring rooms their parents stirred, but none could shake their anchored dreams in time to stop the children leaving. The older ones collected babies from cribs or drew them from their sleeping mothers’ breasts. They’d already waited too long. The world was burning and all their mothers could manage to do was sweep drifts of ash from the front steps; their fathers shushed them, spun the radio static for answers. The children had answers. They coughed into their sleeves as they walked away from their homes, down moonscaped boulevards, as their parents should have done months ago.
When the parents woke, they didn’t remember their children. They felt an absence, but of what they couldn’t say. Even the empty beds, the mothers’ leaking breasts, the toys underfoot didn’t jog their memories. Still, a mysterious urgency fluttered in their chests, sent them hurrying room to room. A picture book left open, a smashed piggybank in the corner. The longer they stared at these things, the less they understood them. So they began to look away. They had more time to sweep. They feared the fires less because they were only afraid for themselves. One mother finally drank the good tequila; her resulting headache obliterated any hope of remembering. Her husband agreed it was peaceful in a way it hadn’t been in years.
The children walked and walked until they reached the river. No longer the mighty salmon spawning grounds of history books, its waters ran low and iridescent. The children abandoned the strollers on the trash-choked banks. The oldest, a freckled bolt of a girl, did a head count, then instructed the others to make a human chain through the sludge and ferry the youngest across in their arms. She was vigilant, counted again on the other side. Filthy and shaking, they collapsed beneath a maple’s bare limbs and ate stale crackers and jellybeans. The babies cried for milk, but they would soon forget. No one argued. There were gulps of sadness. The girl stripped to her underclothes, draped her mucky jeans over a rock to dry. Then she returned to the river’s edge, looked back in the direction they’d come. No one moved. She coughed once and spat in the slimy shallows. Then she picked up a rock, chucked it in. Gradually, the others joined her and did the same. The river boiled with stones and its bank was noisy with the grunts of the children hurling them. Soon, though, the babies began to wail. They wailed to feel something akin to fresh air on their faces—an absence of smoke, anyway. The children’s hands fell back to their sides, and no one coughed as they had before.
Where is it? What am I looking for? the parents wondered as they climbed upstairs, downstairs, forgetting to eat, bathe, sleep. They bumped into one another, bounced off one another, paid more attention to the animals. Eventually, the dogs walked away from their stroking hands. The smoke grew so thick it shuttered the sun. No one knew it yet (yes, the dogs did), but the planet was dead. They felt it, though, a quickening like the last sluice of bathwater down the drain. It was someone’s fault, but whose? Those people in the neighbouring town, and the towns to the north, south, east, and west. The parents were furious, and their rage quashed the uneasiness they’d felt since the children left. One father almost remembered. He sat on the sofa nuzzling the soft underside of his forearm, compelled, even, to caress his own flesh.
“What are you doing?” his wife asked.
“Here,” he said, offering his arm. “What does this remind you of?”
The days were diabolically hot, but not toxic as at home. With no one to tell them otherwise, the children stayed up too late. The babies rolled and crawled about the tinder forest floor while their siblings scavenged withered berries and parched clover or hung like cheetahs in the crumbling arbutus trees. Each breath was a feast for their small lungs. Within hours, it seemed, they grew thinner, taller, adapting to their new environment. One night, a vulture hauled a baby three feet off the ground before the others could beat it away. After that, they grew serious, divided into groups and fashioned surprisingly sound shelters. They rationed what food they’d brought and hunted for more. The forest was sick, yes, but there were still a few rodents left to be skewered. The freckled girl offered to catch bottom-feeders, but the others worried she might sneak off, scurry back the way they’d come. “Why would I go back?” she said. No one knew why—the blisters that had erupted on their skin after crossing the river were only just beginning to heal. They knew only that she couldn’t. She was the first who’d thought to rock the babies, the first to string their names into a lullaby that carried them to sleep.
The parents grew ill. Their ribs began to crack from the coughing. Their animals, the all-knowing dogs, died. They wheelbarrowed the creatures’ bodies to a canyon the fire had yet to jump, dumped them in, and stumbled blindly back to their homes. Inside, they sealed the doors and windows with their children’s bedding and lay curled like abandoned seashells on the floor. Sometimes they felt quick footsteps vibrating through the boards beneath them and opened their eyes, expecting to see what? They only saw each other. Maybe they were already dead. If not already, then soon.
The girl worked all day to haul a sluggish sturgeon from the river muck with her bare hands. Near dusk, exhausted and sore, she finally encircled its ancient body of watery memories with her arms. She felt its old-world currents in her blood, and her thirst for the river of a hundred years ago was bottomless and bygone. Rank with slow death, the sturgeon didn’t protest its capture; it only looked so mournful that she was forced to let it go.
She suggested to the others it was time to move on; they could once again taste smoke. Particulate grated the undersides of their eyelids. The children gathered cross-legged on the bank, skimming their hands over raspy clumps of dead moss. The girl was tall and strong the way girls often are before boys outgrow them, but even the tallest boy lowered his gaze. The children watched as their dinner, the sturgeon, burrowed into the earth’s sour embrace and forgave her. They understood she was their leader. They made a circle around her and wiped the mud and stench from her limbs with the cuffs of their sleeves. She shivered, hugged a baby close, and craved the heat of her mother’s thighs when she used to slide her cold feet between them.
One night, while the parents slept, it rained enough to extinguish the fires, which is to say, biblically, unnaturally. The ash turned to mud and rose to their front doors, spilled through the cracks. They woke trying to sweep it away from their sides, creating sludgy angels on the floor around them. They crawled upstairs to escape it. They were almost happy for the change, a roar that wasn’t flames. They looked in the direction of the fires, where they’d burned for so long. With the smoke now cleared they saw houses like their own, windows imploding as the waters rose. People were climbing out onto their roofs to await rescuers who would never arrive. One woman waved.
The river surged; its banks disappeared. The children had not left in time. They climbed trees until they looked out over the forest canopy, which, the girl realized, was really just a collection of skyward-reaching sticks. Crawling among them, they were last gasps of green. Or were they locusts? They were both, she decided, and almost fainted at this truth. There was nothing she could do, nothing any of them could do. She wove her way through the branches, kissing the other children’s heads as her father had done the last time it snowed, the same year she learned to walk. Even with the fires extinguished, a hot wind continued to blow. The trees swayed. Soon their brittle roots would disengage from the earth, and, at last, they would all fall down. For now, though, the bigger children held the babies tightly, fearful of dropping them. When the babies opened their mouths to cry, they filled with bitter rain. There was a loud crack upstream, followed by groans and claps. A house rounded a bend in the river, its walls unfolding as it tore past on the muddy current. They recognized the house. The bloated remains of a dog sailed past next. They thought they recognized the dog, too.
The parents clung to what they could. They looked around for someone to blame. Those who’d managed to climb into boats rammed their oars into passing ones, trying to capsize them. They couldn’t yell (smoke had destroyed their voices), but they stretched their mouths around screams. The flood fed all of them—the people from the towns to the north, south, east, and west—into the river and swept them downstream. They were glad to be leaving and frightened to die. In the boats their laps felt light when they should have been heavy. One mother almost remembered. She pinched her hands between her thighs.
The rain eased and the sky became less dull. “Look,” one of the small ones called out, “over there.” In the canopy, in the distance, more children. Where had they come from? To whom did they belong? Below, on the swollen river, two boats rounded the bend. “Mom!” the girl shouted. The boats were at odds, trying to upend each other. “Mom!” the children called in crow-like chorus. It was all of their mothers. It was none of them. The warring adults were too preoccupied to look up. Or they didn’t hear over the rushing water. The adults had forgotten who would inherit the earth. Or they no longer cared.
The girl slipped on a branch and caught herself. Even at a distance, she felt the group of unknown kids watching. Then something pelted her shoulder: a sun-parched pinecone. Next, a shower of them, a siege. There was laughter from one side, cries from the other. The girl thought she recognized one of them, a boy close in age she’d often seen riding a red bike past her home.
Beneath them, the waters had begun to recede and soggy islands appeared like prized sand dollars. On both sides, the babies were bawling and the smaller children were scared. The girl knew she had to climb down and face whatever awaited. What would they eat? Where would they sleep? She longed to share these worries with someone else. After all, she was only thirteen.
She lowered herself down a branch, then another, another, until finally she dropped to the ground. Immediately, she sunk to her knees in mud. She withdrew one foot, but the other sank deeper. Panic made her lightheaded; the earth was about to swallow her whole. At least I’ll be done worrying, she thought, at least I’ll sleep. The mud rose almost to her hips.
Something hard knocked her on the head then, and she thought the rival children had come to finish her off, but it was only the boy, crouched on a nearby rock, holding an oar out toward her. For a heartbeat the girl considered giving in to her exhaustion, but then cheers started up in branches overhead. A riotous chorus of whoops and bellows and shouts. Her wayward family urging her on.
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Excerpted from Welcome to the Neighbourhood: Stories by Clea Young. © 2025 Clea Young. Published by House of Anansi Press www.houseofanansi.com
