I wake up thinking of strange things.

The red tide blooms off the coast, I can see the purple tint of it from my bedroom window. It's sucking the oxygen out of the water. We've heard stories of how it's spreading, from Canada to Florida, and the corpses washing up on shore,otters and seals and birds oh my. It's brevetoxin they tell us. Accumulated in the shellfish, who feed on the algae, filter the poisonous little creatures into their castles, which are then stormed and sieged by marine life. It's a neurotoxin, we can see the creatures stumbling on the shore like zombies, unable to control their limbs, collapsing into still breathing heaps on the rocks. Shellfish consumption by humans is illegal, whole towns and ports are closed for business. We retreat from the coasts, scurry inland. No point in living by the water anymore. Can't swim in it, can't eat anything from it. The few that stay behind for reasons either aesthetic or economic, we don't talk about the water. It's the silent monster to the east, inexorably growing.


The rotting garbage washes up on the beaches, like bloody innards, baking in the sun. At first we tried to shovel it off, we fed it to farm animals, we used it as compost. It's not toxic anymore, once it's dead, but its noxious. The stinking pestilence now just lays there, we've given up. It builds on the beach, and it reminds me of a coral reef, layers upon layers, pressing on each other, someday becoming fortresses of fossilized rock. The intrepid ones, who have not yet surrendered to the tide, will go down to the beach and study the dead animals that wash up with the refuse. Sharks, squid, some monstrous things we've never seen before, being carried from the cold polluted depths of the oceans, telling us how far the plague has spread.