You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard

sister always replaced her indigo hair bow with an orange one on royal birthdays. And how I followed her everywhere, chanting that she was a pig, which I was always unjustly punished for. How I fed her staggeringly complicated lies that went on for weeks and ended in disaster with my parents or teachers. How I slept in her bed the last three nights before she died of the flu epidemic.
    Her cousins had also died then, Cato told me. If somebody even just mentioned the year 2015, her aunt still went to pieces. She didn’t let go of my hands, so I went on, and told her that, being an outsider as a little boy, I’d noticed
something
was screwed up with me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. I probably wasn’t as baffled by it as I sounded, but it was still more than I’d ever told anyone else.
    She’d grown up right off the Boompjes; I’d been way out in Pernis, looking at the Caltex refinery through the haze. The little fishing village was still there then, huddled in the center of the petrochemical sprawl. My sister loved the lights of the complex at night and the fires that went hundreds of feet into the air like solarflares when the waste gases burned off. Kids from other neighborhoods never failed to notice the smell on our skin. The light was that golden sodium vapor light, and my father liked to say it was always Christmas in Pernis. At night I was able to read with my bedroom lamp off. While we got ready for school in the mornings, the dredging platforms with their twin pillars would disappear up into the fog like Gothic cathedrals.
    A week after I told her all that, I introduced Cato to Kees. “I’ve never seen him like this,” he told her. We were both on track for one of the technology universities, maybe Eindhoven, and he hadn’t failed Dutch. “Well, I’m a pretty amazing woman,” she explained to him.
    Kees and I both went on to study physical geography and got into the water sector. Cato became the media liaison for the program director for Rotterdam Climate Proof. We got married after our third International Knowledge for Climate Research conference. Kees asked us recently which anniversary we had coming up, and I said eleventh and Cato said it was the one hundredth.
    It didn’t take a crystal ball to realize we were in a growth industry. Gravity and thermal measurements by GRACE satellites had already flagged the partial shutdown of the Atlantic circulation system. The World Glacier Monitoring Service, saddled with having to release one glum piece of news after another, had just that year reported that the Pyrenees, Africa, and the Rockies were all glacier-free. The Americans had just confirmed the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Once-in-a-century floods in England were now occurring every two years. Bangladesh was almost entirely a bay and that whole area a war zone because of the displacement issues.
    It’s the catastrophe for which the Dutch have been planning for fifty years. Or, really, for as long as we’ve existed. We had cooperative water management before we had a state. The one created the other; either we pulled together as a collective or got swept away asindividuals. The real old-timers had a saying for when things fucked up: “Well, the Netherlands lives with water.” What they meant was that their land flooded twice a day.
    Bishop Prudentius of Troyes wrote in his annals that in the ninth century the whole of the country was devoured by the sea; all the settlements disappeared, and the water was higher than the dunes. In the Saint Felix Flood, North Beveland was completely swept away. In the All Saints’ Flood, the entire coast was inundated between Flanders and Germany. In 1717 a dike collapse killed fourteen thousand on Christmas night.
    â€œYou like going on like this, don’t you?” Cato sometimes asks.
    â€œI like the way it focuses your attention,” I told her once.
    â€œDo you like