I know this is a tiny part of the wider problems born of diet culture, fatphobia, classism, and racism but like god the idea that "healthy" food must inherently taste bad has completely ruined us as a society.

part 1 barbarian Katsuki x fem!reader

This is my first time writing a story so if it's bad pls tell me what I can do to fix it

Enjoy<33

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You sit there in the wooden run down shop as you look out the window. The smell of blood and burnt wood is all you can smell now the screams have died down now but you know they are still out there.

Waring: mentions of blood, fire, violence and death

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Early that day you were with Ms. Rose helping with her shop as you usual do "thank you dear" you smile at the little old and say "it's no problem" she smiles at you as she walks to the door to put the open sign outside as she was about to open the door there were screams from outside. You look at the door in shock before you can say anything Ms. Rose tells you "go into the broom closet" as she points to the left side of the room you look at her and ask "why..whats going on??" "go NOW and don't come out till I say so" as she push you into the closet and close the door. You look threw the crack from in between the doors as you see her run to the door but she wasn't fast often to as a huge man walks threw the door covered in tattoos and holding huge axe. He looks down at Ms. Rose with a evil grin Ms. Rose stare up at him in shock as she opens her mouth to talk but before she could say anything he rose his axe and slammed it in to her skull. I look in shock from what I saw I wanted to go out there and beat him up but I knew that would do me no good so I stood and watched as he took the axe out of her skull and looked around I was praying he didn't see me lucky he didn't he walked out. I waited till I couldn't hear his heavy foot steps anymore but I can hear the screams of others I slowing open the door I try not to look at Ms. Rose dead corpse. I slowing look out the window the smell of blood and burnt wood is strong and the screams have died down. I can hear their foot steps get further and further so you feel that's it safe to walk out so you do. You make it outside and think of where to go you heard the footsteps go to the left side of town so run to the right side of town to the gate you try hard not to look at the dead bodies and try to ignore the sound of your feet running in the pools of blood. You are a few feet away from the gate as you look up to see there is a man much similar to the one from the shop expect this one seem to have more scars and tattoos. He had spiky dirty blonde hair and ruby red eyes. You can feel him staring at you with the look of hungry in his eyes. Your face turns to pure shock as you turn to run but only to feel a hard object hit your head you fall to the ground you groan in pain and turn to look up. He was standing over you with a pissed off looked "where the fuck you think your going. huh?" that was the last thing you heard and saw before you black out.

OK so I need a Kassvin of Blavio trivia, that MF seems fun as fuck 🍻🍻🍻

He had a mastectomy but didn't have any boobs to begin with.

Went to college to study culinary arts. He hates frat boys to this very day.

Is 5"6', wich is tall for a blavian, especially an afab person.

He/they nonbinary, is fine with being considered a man, his native tounge does not have gendered pronouns.

Speaks 3 langages. Has a heavy accent.

Full name is Kassvin Tamdar Blavió'sy/Blavió'su. Meaning Tamdar Kassvin of Blavió. Tamdar is a profession, he is the representative of Blavian citizens and works to better their lives.

He was adopted into his family as a baby. He has since grew up to be yet another kind of baby because he's sixteen years younger than his brother Avilir and almost twenty years younger than his sister Chandra. And also all of them are tall because frick Kassvin.

He has a horse named Kerosine. Shes a queen, we stan.

He is a really good handiman. Fixes roof after roof like a champ. First he nails this roof, then he nails your mom!

The people love him, because hes not just the baby in the family, hes the baby in all of Blavió. Most citizens of his age have a celebrity crush on him at some point of their lives. He's a national blorbo.

Isn't vegan or vegetarian but he cannot stand how cooked meat looks while still on the bone. He just cannot ignore that it's a burnt corpse that could be him or anyone he loves.

A menace to anyone he's not responsible for. His goblin energy is held back by many years of practice so the citizens can safely rely on him when they need his help.

Small feet.

Spent a couple of years in the US, he's still traumatized. Fucking frat boys.

Likes to go hunting with Kerozine. He dissapears for weeks at a time and then comes home to drop off twenty kilos of tanned hide.

What happened to the meat?

:)

Obviously, he's a patriot. But in a good way because his nation has no legacy of genocide.

Claims to be a different star sign every time.

Does the dumbest shit with Lance. They once tried to build a batman signal that only dragons can se because their eyes can detect a much vider range of light. Did not work.

Sneezes really cutely. *all of Blavió collectively awwing*

A neat freak. He will beat you up with a broom if you don't take your shoes off at the enterance.

Loves frogs so damn much.

At any time he is wearing something green.

A really hairy lad.

This is the second time making this post because i am angry as fuck because for some reason when I added the names it didn't save so I'm doing this shit again 

Hey! I had a stupendus idea, the past few days I've gathered a bunch of mitten squad quotes and captain sauce quotes

Soooo, I'll put wich book of mario characters would say each quote and we'll see what happens

Yes I know 99% of the mitten squad quotes is gonna be bolivia and carbon

Also, some quotes reference characters and locations, so I'll put an [ ] with what I think the book of mario counterpart would be

MITTEN SQUAD SEGMENT 

Lewis:"I have successfully turned an ordinary kitchen utensil into the most valuable fork in the known universe, no one man should have this kind of power, but I am not mortal man, as a sexualy identity as a big rock being thrown into the ocean"

Princess of peaches, talking about 1 TEC-20"The robot wasn't able to pick the lock and I lacked the fire power to blow the bitch open" 

Marc:"I left a broom there too so my bucket wouldn't be lonely"

Carbon:"Calm down vegetarians I am talking about animals in video games, animals in real life matter way less"

Barney one:"Killing it isn't the hard part, the hard part is getting away from the explosion of the goddamm Nagasaki bomb strapped up its ass that was rigged to explode once it died"

Bolivia:"Todd Howard [barbie], even in death you find a way to fuck me"

Bolivia:"We came back to the little shit with the ant problem and killed most of the ants, I left one alive for the boy, either he becomes a man or that ant will have a very good day" 

Goomb:"Me brain fixed gud no hurt no more"

Marc:"Picked up trash for the make a wish kid"

Bolivia, talking about maria:"Because she hits like a bull with down syndrome and has the personality of a piece of plywood"

Belize:"You might be wondering, who is the boy and who is the girl? I won't give it away but I will say this, the knife is a whore"

Maria:"I had armor, i had supplies, i had pockets full of room temperature tomatos"

Bolivia:"For some reason I thought that stupid the horse v2 could fly, bad decision on my part"

Carbon:"For some reason this shrapnel character had 200 BB's, what a weirdo, who caries around 200 BB's?, anyway, I talked to daddy and brought my 300 BB's and headed off to clear off the Jefferson memorial"

Goverman::"Get a juice box and strap on your helmet, because we're going to hell"

Carbon:"I punched a puppy to death"

Marc:"My iq is similar to that of a 14 year old block of cheese"

Lewis:"Theres an oxygen exhaust pipe, the second best tipe of pipe to suck on to keep yourself alive, for those who need hand holding, that was not a drug reference, this is a family friendly channel, it was a suicide joke"

Bolivia:"I got an amazing slow motion shot of dogmeat getting fucked to death by a nuclear warhead"

Maria:"My only option was to become a vampire, wich sucked"

Bolivia:"But just as when like how every virtual dog goes to hell when it dies, what the fuck does that even mean?"

Carbon:"I took advantage of a unconscious military officer and beat him to death"

Barney one:"Nothing else says more victory than overdosing on drugs after a war"

Prof. Ceasar reality:"And decided to go to the much bigger and much more research facility x-13 research facility facility center, WHAT? I think I had a stroke"

Bolivia:"Used more than 3% of my frag mines to blow up a dog"

Carbon:"The last few coursers ran for their non existence lives and I went after them because I'm not letting anyone get away, one got away"

Maria:"I got a warning saying that nuka world is intended for those level 30 or above, Mathematics show us that me being lv11 is close enough to lv30"

Carbon:"Killed a pain-maker and got a glimpse into the big G in the sky who manifested himself as a fire axe floating in the air, this voodoo shit has no place in zion so I chopped of the pain-maker's legs and arms so If there is an afterlife he will be a cripple in hell for all eternity"

Goverman:"Its head turned into jelly, I threw its egg down into the nightmare bellow, and then I jumped after it"

Carbon:"A herd of big hornets paid the ultimate price for being alive"

Goverman:"Used his gun to turn off a woman"

Maria:"Me being the player can't open the door, theres a know you have to twist it its a whole process"

Goverman explained why maria survived the fall:"One of them belonged to God and refused to die"

Goombell, talking about hoko saba:"The dragon I pretended to not exist a few minutes ago is one of my mom's friend's kids so I had to play with him even tho he's weird"

Belize:"There was no hamster's luck in a garbage disposal chance that I would follow this giant fuck all the way to the cit ruins"

Lewis:"Along the way i saved a shopping cart from drowning and returned it to its family"

Prof. Ceasar reality:"Its about 24 million cheez its away from New vegas"

Bolivia:"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to bedworld"

Carbon:"With enough notches in my pistol to spell psychopath in braille"

Gooverman:"I spie with my little eye a ville whore who deserves to die, I cleaved her back in half with my stick and what I saw was glorious"

Maria?:"Its kinda like playing the floor is lava, but you can't see the lava and instead of burning to death you turn into a vegetable"

IDK"I hid from Ringo by hiding in ringo"

Bolivia:"The plate worked as well I thought it would, wich means it didn't work"

Bolivia:"There was a 3 for 1 discount on dead raiders if you use the promo code granade at checkout"

Belize:"The only explanation is that has a 5th appendage wich he pulls out on special occasions, wich probably isn't the case, we all know elmo doesn't pull out"

Goomb:"You don't need those things, Jesus got trough his life without any guns"

Goombape:"When i played it as a children"

Barbie:"Its like how you don't know if your life has any meaning until you die and see your score"

Belize:"This was the most stealth oriented part of the game by a metric mile"

Bolivia:"I stripped him naked, talked with Elliot [lewis] whose face bothered me for some reason,Talked with the samurai[maria], talked with red dead redemption [barney one]"

Carbon:"Some idiot spilled red paint on the clouds"

Bolivia:"Before traveling with the wizard, I spent some time pestering earnie with the prospect of friendship, by walking back and forth in front of him, making him think i wanted to talk to him just for me to keep on walking,I was voted the quietest guy I high-school and I know how loud earnie is screaming inside his head right now, it's kinda fun to be in this side of it :) ,also this isn't related to the video in any way, I just wanted to make it known that i have a sealed copy of elmos letter adventure for Nintendo 64 and you don't"

Maria:"I knew I could use that as a lighthouse of sorts in order to cast myself further into the ocean until i drowned in my own disappointment"

Goombell:"Vulpes[carbon] was adopted, his mother is both infertile and imaginary"

Belize:"Being alone is mental, you can be surrounded by friends family laughs and love on Christmas morning and still be alone in your head"

Bolivia:"I acted in self defense by committing various war crimes"

Carbon:"My throwing spears were broken and wouldn't fly,stupid fucking game" 

Bolivia:"That wasn't a lie, it just wasn't the truth"

Maria:"If there's anything Shaun b knows to do is die"

Boombell:"The number of bear traps I activated for sexual reasons turned my angles into a fine powder"

Goverman:"Where the grass is green and the air is even greener"

IDK"I consulted a doctor who flucked out of medical school and followed his advice by killing myself"

Belize:"Being a futuristic[X-nauti], nazi dominated world version of polly poc,etc it has its own set of drawbacks"

Marc:"They're mass effect 3 of fallout 3's 5th dlc, I've never played mass effect"

Lewis:"Who loves their father like how their brother loves his mother's sister"

Carbon:"Like most existential crises it went away after I killed somebody"

Carbon:"If you're wraped in chains and dropped into an empty bathtub to drown, a snorklew won't save you"

Goombape:""A wise man once said "hi! Jeanie may's here"  and he's right, there has to be a better way""

Browser:"After it took 3 grown man to kidnap a baby with a gun"

goldbob:"The lever action gun riffle can kill a mutant in a single shot if you land a shot that can kill it in one hit"

Maria:"Its 2020, Noone wants to use their hands anymore"

Bolivia:"Before journeying into more death, some jackass hit me with a granade and killed me, not the explosion, the granade bouncing off my soon to be corpse is was what made me dead"

Belize:"Some Neanderthals gave me their bullets to hold in a pretty rude way >:("

Princess of peaches:"Im not worried about offending blind people, it's not like they'll be watching this"

Carbon:"30 seconds is longer than you'd think, ask anyone whose been on fire"

Lewis:"I was as useful as a comatose toddler with a nerf gun at pearl harbor"

Goomb:"I also poused the challenge to satisfy the curiosity of mine regarding the birds in the sky that Don real because birds aren't exist"

Marc:"Any doctor worth their weight in styrofoam cups can fix a leg with their feet"

Bolivia:"I had me a silenced weapon, but I didn't account for today being his birthday, this changes everything, so I shaped for hollow point"

Carbon:"Maybe if Steve earlin had a gun instead of a snorklew he'd still be alive today"

Marc:"It took me 30 minutes and 3 phone calls to get my food because I'm too much of a pussy to go outside at 10 o'clock at night while drunk in a Christmas sweater after news year to steal my own food of one my neighbors doorstep"

Maria:"We've got rogue, tank dampse, and squidword"

Lewis;"And they're no joke, but I am, I am the big joke and my body is the punchline"

Bolivia:"I got mentally Nagasaki'd by this guy at the stables"

IDK"And went outside where Victor is unhappy with me, after killing Victor, Victor came out of the lucky 38 to avenge victor" 

Bolivia:" i shot a kid, i sent that little bitch to the moon"

Sushiya,  testing her products:"The door was of its axis, a plate was misbehaving on the chair, a cattle was dancing on the table like the whore she is"

Carbon:"And went shopping for dead bodies, they weren't in stock,  but i know a guy who knows a guy who could help me out, both of those guys are me"

Bolivia:"Now vault yosh is I your head too, and he won't be going anywhere"

Maria's son:"As much of a monster that I look like, I think it's gonna work"

Sushiya:"But you know what they say, imagination is what happens when annoyance meets drug use"

Carbon:"If they're stupid enough to be in my way they might as well be my enemy"

Goverman:"But the slippery bastard was too clever, he walked around it, I didn't even know that such a maneuver was even possible"

IDK"Homeland security at this point has yet to be impregnated by a sentient barrel of oil"

Bolivia:" if I drunkenly put a giant hole on my sink with a goddam coffee cup imagine what I could do with a gun"

Belize:"Got ambushed in the freezer while searching for chicken nuggets"

Goverman:"But the fucken bullet Williams come flying out of fucking nowhere"

Maria:"The next second you're in a universe where everything that exists is the sick bastard child of a drunken fuckfest between a pin screen and a light brush"

Bolivia:"Ask the cashier if they have a granade, if they say no, say nothing for a few seconds, put a big smile, put your hands on theirs and quietly ask, would you like one?"

Sean hampton:"Can't do anything until I have my arms around a fat man"

Barbie:"The premise of this run is that I have no arms and I must dab"

Maria's son:"I told you before that I was a genetic disaster"

Bolivia:"And in that cabin, theres some west Virginian mountain folk who are so deep in incest that one of them somehow managed to be his own father"

Bolivia:"Can you hear that? It's…. It's an air conditioner! And it's so fucking anoying, aw no I hurt it's feelings :( "

Goverman:"He could probably put the end of his musket inside his mouth, pull the trigger and still miss"

Barney one:"The big beaver ended his life in stile, he even made a summersault into the afterlife"

Goverman:"Im a good Christian boy,  I'll save my ammo for my suicide"

Carbon:"I am not Cinderella, I'm a parasite"

IDK"I played with a doggy too, it used the flesh on my arm as a chew toy, and I booked his nose with a nuclear newspaper to show that that kind of thing isn't allowed in the mitten squad household"

Sean hampton:"The crusable is a magical weapon like divorce papers, capable of tearing everything it comes across in half"

Barbie:"The curse of grandma sparkle managed to reach me all the way in hell"

Barney one:"If you are gonna get a cat, you might get a gun aswell"

Belize:"Corn on the Joe sat back not helping his brother's"

Carbon:"I bought 24 regular bullets,28 hollow points, and 60 that need to wear a helmet"

Bolivia:"After the squad died I had to content with the leftovers, the scraps, statically speaking the majority of what remained"

Lewis:"What I need to face is like a toddler with a learning disability, that would be fair"

Carbon:"I took both left eyes of this dead guy "

Carbon:"It took longer to pull out the Esther than it took of kill the general"

Sushiya, while high:"Deeper inside shit got weird, i killed a giant skeleton right? Nothing weird about that, but then his body just kinda danced in place really slowly, I tought speeding up time would fix it, that was a massive fucking mistake, and changing time back to normal was an even bigger mistake, he'll be hunting me until I die, but until then he'll still be dancing"

CAPTAINSAUCE SEGMENT 

Carbon:"They're old, how hard can it be to turn them into blueberry jam and ram them into the grass"

Belize:"I guess if you do electrocute a tank enough it would just explode"

Boliviz:"Id have a better chance of finding a snowball down here than winning a coin toss"

Marc:"How does my Christmas lights break to a stiff breeze but these ones are practically terminators"

Barney one:"I never tought id see the day where I would have to hire a sniper to assassinate a troublesome light bulb but here we are "

Lewis:"I get the feeling if you try to milk a minotaur then you're gonna be its wife"

Sushiya:"In the history of mankind do you think we've ever seen a snake fight an octopus?"

Goverman:"Lets see if you can wobble your way trough the grim reaper" [the grim being carbon]

Goldbob:"Its a steaming pile of something ill tell you that much"

Goverman:"He died? How! Did he have an allergic reaction to the sun?"

Goomb:"Michelangelo is Swiss cheese and where good to go"

Bolivia:"It really looks like I'm taking a sharpened stick to a bazooka fight"

Maria:"HOW DID I GO FROM FIGHTING AN OCTOPUS IN A SUIT TO WW3???"

Princess of peaches, talking about 1TEC-20:"Im playing pictionary with a blind robot"

maria:"Theres on the nose dialogue and then there's punch you in the nose dialogue"

Bolivia,  talking about barney one:"This lady looks like her father was half refrigerator"

IDK"Im supposed to sabotage the mail missile assembly line but it looks like someone got here before me"

Belize?:"And the ghosts of previously murdered pianos???"

Maria:"Im getting outsmarted by puppets"

Bolivia:"After careful deliberation with my associate we've come to the conclusion that the local government must have Removed all quarters from circulation,  the laundromat went under and before you know it the entire society fell into nudism and then anarchy "

Carbon?:"This is like the hunger games of sesame street"

IDK"Im a weird shotgun santa"

Garlic?:"Oh damm! CTHULO IS THICC"

Krump:"What kind of interdimensional time traveling toilet is this?"

Carbon:"Wheater it be cultural appropriation or demonic abomination,  i don't realy care im just gonna try to hit it with a pee bucket" 

Carbon:"THIS IS THE MEDIEVAL RUSSIAN VERSION OF DRIVING INTO BATTLE WITH A TANK BUT SHOOT PEOPLE WITH A BB GUN"

Belize::"I DIDN'T KNOW GRANNY WAS TAKING GRAVEDIGGER TO CHURCH THIS MORNING" 

Goombell:"This isn't a bridge its just the worlds weakest motorcycle trebuchet "

Bolivia:"Oh hellow mr berry"

Carbon:"Giant alien space worm 2020, make America worm poop again"

Bolivia:"When did snuffy[barney one] decide to judas me and join the hobbits?[origamis]"

Lewis:"Theres a surprisingly high amount of chickens in this map and a dramatic lack of eggs"

Bolivia:"Im pretty sure we've sent the first claim to the moon"

Maria:"And yet I'm forced to defend myself from stuff like bloodthirsty scp's using nothing but uncooked t-bone stake, I mean technically its doable but it doesn't make It any less ridiculous"

Barbie:"What's the point of a metal detector if literally everyone here has somekind of cybernetic, like I swear to God If I walk trough here aND you guys start pounding the shit out of me just because I got a couple of extra inches of robo-dong IM GONNA BE PISSED"

Bolivia:"Everyone's wearing slick black suits meanwhile I look like somebody skinned a couch from the 70s"

Sushiya:"Is this bacon flavored weed or weed flavored bacon?"

Sean hampton:"Do you think that Darth Vader ever had to deal with a rebel or a henchmen who was into getting chocked? Like starts force checking them and they tell him to go harder?"

Koopley:"I was stabbed to death by a naked man with a spear and my arm is perpetually running"

Koop kotu:"So I'm crazy enough to be locked behind bars but not crazy enough to think I can fly*

Bolivia:"Usually spooders have 8 arms not 8 abs"

Carbon:"I just bludgeoned Jesus to death with a stick of meat, I'm guessing he's gonna be back in a couple of days he's gonna be looking for me so we'll start running now"

Carbon:"Im done with words, shooty goody time"

Maria?:"Id have a better time cutting down bushes then these strange little robo hobits"

Belize:"Dad this is not the time to be dancing with crabs!"

Maria:"Thats my little brother, who has a fully posable deny devito action figure,I've always been jealous of that one"

Bolivia:"The turns are tabbleling"

Maria, talking about barbie:"She's not exactly the brightest tool at the picnic"

Belize:"Are you kidding me mom? Realy?, you were the one that said you're sick of seeing donkey kongs donkey dong"

Maria:"I have no idea what was in that Wonster energy drink that made him go master roshe style"

Bolivia:"I want to file a complaint against Stacy [belize] for T-posing to assert Dominance over me"

Marc:"Believe it or not dangling a padlock the size of a shoebox from a doorknob does as much work as I want to"

Caesar reality:"You can never have too many rotten floor bananas"

Carbon:"Poisoning your boss is probably not the best way to skip work, but ya boy gotta do what he has to do"

Goverman:"I'll take nicknames of my penis for 300$ alex"

Starvinden?:"I guess we'll just leave you in your special sarcophagus mr tutan-deez-nuts"[browser]

Lewis:"I've been skipping work for 2 weeks now and I'm starting to think that my computer isn't even plugged in"

Bolivia, talking to maria:"Your suit smells like a wet fart and your mouth smells like a ashtray"

Bolivia:"If anyone needs me I'll be on the insane asylum,  why am I caressing a mannequin on top of a boat?"

Carbon:"Would you like to hang yourself or be crucified? Dealers choice!"

Bolivia talking about carbon:"He's doing something ingenious probably diabolical……..or he's dressed as a panda"

Marc:"We should really pay for security around here not only are people breaking in there is also a giant spine breaking chickens"

Maria to Bolivia:"You are very angry at that stake"

Sushiya, after using its products:"I wonder why was I twerking at the office statue"

IDK"WHY IS THERE A GIANT NAKED MAN IN THE LOCKER CHOCKING ME TO DEATH WITH A CHAIN??!!!"

goombell:"I guess we're gonna leave the cookie monster dildo in the locker"

Sean hampton, to Maria:"My love for you is like diarrhea, sometimes I just can't hold it in"

Bolivia:"You're watching me In a Google video platform playing a game from a Google gaming platform that was translated using Google translate, if this isn't a dystopian future I don't know what is"

Bolivia?:"I couldn't have predicted the run after her like a velociraptor made out of pool noodles"

Lewis:"Jumping Jack neighbor help me!"

Bolivia:"Bread! There's no bread,there's your bread! That's a cookie God dammit"

Belize:"So I can be invited to the worlds saddest birthday party"

Maria:"I guess we're playing ring around the Rosie till I lose his dumb ass"

Carbon:"If you see jehovah's witness you tell them to eat shit"

Bolivia:"HOW CAN YOU AFFORD A GUARD BIRD AND NOT A DOOR STOP?"

Bolivia::"For my shopping list I need to find a floppy disk with a s, but for the distraction I could use a floppy dick with sunglasses and a tie"

Carbon:"I really hoped that your little bird bath had a couple inches of water so I could steal a tiny toaster to throw it in with you"

Belize::"Its pretty safe to say Mr voice bad Benjamin good, but we just saw Benjamin talk with the grim reaper and pull around a cart wich is about the size of a child's body"

Goombell:"She may have a crush on the interdimensional death fox"

Maria:"Its like the herpes of craft supplies"

Barney one:"Everyone wants to split checks for keano Reaves, even if they're a 10ft dragon made out of logos and seizures what is going on right now?"

Sushiya, high, again:"When I dilapidated the banana and poked the mayo's brain then had an indept conversation with the strawberry cocoon did bread get arrested? I didn't see the police come by, that would make sense because the alcoholic cat ran away"

Carbon:"IF THEY HAVE AN ASS TO PULL PUNS OUT OF THEY HAVE TO HAVE A BRAIN TO THINK THEM UP"

Goombell:"I think I graduated for the university of food torture"

Well, this is all, took some time but it's here, hope you enjoyed

Frequent reblogers

<《{[(@boom-fanfic-a-latta )]}》>

<《{[( @gumdorp )]}》>

PLEASE REBLOG!

Requested by: @hello-lucky-luka

The corpse groom

Every minimal details had to work, said your parents.

You were being forced to get engaged with Shigaraki Tomura, a noble from a family whose had their status, but no money. In contrary to your family who had money due to their bussines involving fish, but no such tittles.

You had only a conversation with the man, but both your mothers exclaimed how it was scandulous to be alone on a room alone before the marriage.... The wedding rehearsal was a disaster where you just wanted the ground to eat you alive... especially with that random woman laughing.

Despite Shigaraki calling you back, you ran away due to all extress of not being prepared to be married with a man you barely knew... You wish you had never entered that florest though.

A man. A DEAD man emerged from the ground and you colapse... wakening up only by some snickers, noticing that now you were in a world where dead creatures lived.

A man with an eye missing out with blong hair was shaking you and screaned along with yourself when you finally woke up.

"Where am I?! Where is this?! Who are all of you and why do you look so-so-?!"

"Fucked up? Absolute filled with trash? News flashes newbiew! We're fucking dead!" A man spoke, he was huge and with a hole on his chest that you even saw through it.

"Ooh new meat!!!!" Another man with the jaw broken aproached and you yelped, falling on the floor but with arms... DEAD ARMS on you as if they tried to prevent your fall.

"Pardon." The man with glasses spoke before casually kneeling to pick his arms and placed them back to help you stand up.

"T-this i-is-"

"Oi! YOu ShOUlD Be GrAtefUll To BE DraGGed DoWn HeRE!" A creature with their eye hanging of their head spoke and you almost vomited.

"Yes. Parcially because they are master's spouse." One blond man with a fucking katana on his stomach spoke calmly as you gagged in horror.

"W-what w-was that part again?"

"It seems we're engaged." A gruff voice spoke from behind you, scaridly you sneak over your shoulder and gasped at the sign of the main responsible for you to be in this circle of horror.

The man had messy brow hair with golden eyes, his skin was a mix of faint blue due to how long his corpse have been dead as half of one arma of his was pure bones while the other was... "fine". He wore a black messy and torn black tuxedo with half of his tie missing as he crossed his arms over his chest.

You screamed in horror when someone patted him on the back and his fucking eye dropped on your hand.

"Geez is just an eye." The man who patted the other spoke as he gravbed the eye nornally back and handed to the owner, his body was full of holes as if he had been fuzilied.

"Imbecile." The owner of the amber eye punched the back of the white hair man head... making it to fall to thhe floor.

You screamed again.

~

You came to learn that this man was actually murdered. He had fell for a woman's trick to get her hands on the money of his family. Ever since then, the dead people around there told that this man, Chisaki Kai; whose by disgust at himself decided to change his name by Overhaul; vowed to himself that he would wait for someone else, and perfect, to marry him.

And looks like you were the poor soul.

"I-I'm really sorry what happened to you. But I really cant do this! I have another man to-to-"

"YoU'Re An IdiOt?!" The creature screamed and you flinched at how his eyeball swinged... giving you shivers and even the urge to puke.

"We learned that you were on a arrangement married." The white, and dirty, haired man spoke and Chisaki's eyes narrowed.

"So there is another one huh?"

"There's no other one! A-Actually- You're the other one! My groom is waiting up there and you are just... just-!"

"Dead." He hissed and you swear you saw a tinge of sadness on those dead cold amber eyes of his "It doesn't matter. We are engaged and that's final."

He stormed his way out of the room, making every person of there to look at you as YOU made something wrong.

The fuzzilied man and the creature followed after him as you continue to think of something, anything to get you out of that place.

~

"Maybe they lost their head or something." Mimic spoke as Chisaki paced around the room with a frown.

"Shigaraki Tomura. Boss trust me, there's nothing special about this guy! Just give some time to them, and bing! The curse will be broken and you got someo-"

"Stop." He said nonchantly, shoulders sagging in defeat as he ran his reamaining hand on his hair "They have a point. I am prisioned with this.. dead. While they are still with lungs functionanting... maybe it was indeed a mistake." He sighed.

The two man changed worried glances. Before Mimic smirked and elbowed his commurate, aproaching Chisaki slowly.

"What does that wispy little brat have

That you don't have double?"

"He can't hold a candle

To the beauty of your soul." the white haired man placed a hand on his shoulder.

"How about a pulse?" Chisaki hissed, slapping Kurono's hand away from his shoulder.

"Overrated by a mile." Mimic answered smugly.

"Overvalued, overblown

If they only knew

The you that we do" the two continue

"And that despicable little creature

Isn't wearing their ring" kurono pointed to the ring of his finger.

"And he doesn't play piano

Or dance, or sing

No he doesn't compare" the both said in hopes to cheer up his boss and friend.

"But he still breaths air." He noted sharply before the two got in feont of him as he tried to exit.

"Who cares?

Unimportant, overrated

Overblown, if only they could see

How special you can be

If they only knew the you that we do"

He glared a both of them before hsi vision got into the only candle lighten up on the room, frowning at it...

"If I touch a burning candle

I can feel no pain

If you cut me with a knife

It's still the same...

And I know his heart is beating

And I know that I am dead

Yet the pain here that I feel

Try and tell me it's not real

And it seems I still have a tear to shed" he layed his back miserably on the wall and placed his good hand to cover how much his pain was feeling.

"The sole redeeming feature

From that little creature

Is that he's alive," mimic exclaimed while getting from behind, transforming into his human form, still with the eye hanging from his skull as one of his legs were missing.

"everybody knows

That's just a temporary state

Which is cured very quickly

When we meet our fate" Kurono aproached from the other side while taking off his head to make his point.

"Who cares?

Unimportant, overrated

Overblown, if only they could see

How special you can be

If they only knew the you that we do"

Impatience and rage took over him as he punched from behind the two man. The two hissing in pain before seing how numb was he... how miserable he sounded for the first time since they knew him.

"...If I touch a burning candle

I can feel no pain

In the ice or in the sun

It's all the same

Yet I feel my heart is aching

Thou it doesn't beat, it's breaking

And the pain here that I feel

Try and tell me it's not real

I know that I am dead..." he layed on the bed, looking at the ceiling with no hope before closing his eyes.

"Yet it seems I still have

One tear to shed" they widened their eyes at the single drop of water coming out of his closed eye.

"Do deads can cry now?!" Mimic whispered shouted before cursing out loud when Kurono merely sighed and punched him with more force than Chisaki had before.

~

You were absolutely horrified. Not even two days in here and one subordinate of your family had died from a heart attack and appeared on the same place you were stuck in... and it seemes like he brought the news which brought you to the reality.

When you went missing, your and Tomura's family had canceled the wedding due to you not being there, assuming you had ran away from your responsibilities and another woman came in rushing as a thunder to take the responsibility.

This made you realize how... you didn't were cared for by your supposed future broom. It was all a arrangment marrige after all.

The sound of a sad yet beautiful music took your thoughts away as you followed the beautiful melody... finding a door half closed, you decided to pick inside only to widened your eyes in shock as you see the man you were supposed engaged to playing the piano.

People could call you crazy, but in this scenario he looked... quite beautiful. His eyes were sorrow but still focused on the piano in fron of him, slender and bones fingers dancing on each piece of it as his shoulders tensed when he heard the door making it a sound... but still not looking up.

"You play wonderfully." You mused out loud as he scoffed, wincing a bit you remember that he some how must still be offended by what you said earlier.

You slowly and shyly took a seat next to him, visibly noticing him not enjoying the least your company as he still played.

"Im sorry I hurt your feelings-"

"I thought deads didn't had those." He grimaced and you instantly shut uo before slowly playing one note, smilling shyly when he stopped a bit to inspect your actions.

"My parents thought I didn't had to do piano classes, so I sadly didn't had one chance to play such beautiful songs as yours..." you tried to mimic his actions before you and him hissed at the horrific sound it came out.

"God have mercy, your parents were right on not trying to put you onto such a thing." He growled and you felt offended. Going to talk back you closed your mouth when he aproached you, placing his still carnal hand and skeleton one underneath yours, encouting you silently to touch it.

He started to play one song more animated, you gasping in awe at the beauty of it and how he was actually showing you how it was. The sign of it made him smirk as you giggle... although he widened gis eyes whem his hand decided to pop out of his wrist and dance on the fucking piano.

You giggled and hesitantly picked it back, offering him with a smile.

"Pardon." He coughed as he put it back with a scoff as you smiled at him.

The door suddenly slammed open, the blond man who scared you at the first day panting as Chisaki glared at him from his seat with you.

"What is the meaning of this?" He growled, getting up as the poor guy pointed at some place in the hall.

"I-Is urgent boss! Is something about your-" Kurono popped out of no where, shutting his mouth up.

Chisaki gave you an apologetic look before adjusting his tie and going after then.

After a few minutes of no company you sighed and decided to walk around until you heard whispers shouts on what was suppose to be the kitchen.

"I'm sorry master, but the marriage will only be "real" when both of the involved are from the same world." Tengai spoke as you heard Chisaki punching something.

"What is needed then?!" He shouted and you curled in yourself by instinct.

"That's the best part!" Mimic said in glee before darkening his voice "We're going to kill them!"

You muffled your gasp as you pecked inside the room, seing all the man in there looking at Chisaki. Who for the first time had a conflicted expression.

Suddenly he let out a heavy sigh. Making you curious and rather anxious on what he would say.

"No. I was a criminal while alive, but certainly I am not a beast." He murmured as the others on the room frowned.

You laid your back in the wall sighing... biting your lip as all the thoughts in your head ran and ran until you decided to enter the room slowly. Shocking everyone.

"What are you doing in here?" Chisaki growled, eyeing you between his eyes, before taking his hand out of his face to watch you more properly when you took a seat next to him.

"I will do it." You spoke witha smile, giggling a bkt when one of the man's jaw literally fell.

"You heard it." He mused out loud as you pondered over your final decision.

"You weren't selfish enoigh to murder me. And only what you done with my stay in here was trying to be gentle with me until i ruined everything with my hurtful words. But still I have one wish to make.... I want the wedding not to be soon, neither down here... on the surface more likely, so you all and myself can watch the beautiful nightsky."

"... fair enough. Then why are you trying to brush the wedding aside then?" He asked with his noss arched up, you hesitated before grabbing his hand that weren't left any skin or muscles on it, surprinsing him for once.

"Because I want to know my groom before I marry him. And I want you to know about me as well." You smiled and you swore the deadman was smilling as well.

"Very well.... finance."

King Ezekiel x SingleMother!Reader

Read on AO3

Reader is written as female, child is written neutrally.

Rated M - swearing, canon typical violence/gore, mention of child!walkers

Y/n = your name

y/c/n = your child’s name

y/c/e/c = your child’s eye colour

y/c/h/c = your child’s hair colour

This was it. I honestly did not know how in the fuck I could possibly manage to get us out of this particular jam.

We’d been driving along this long, empty road for a few hours. Myself in the driver’s seat, y/c/n sitting in the back seat playing with a slightly dingy stuffed elephant I’d scavenged for them a while ago. I had, stupidly, I realized in hindsight, allowed myself to linger a moment too long while glancing back at y/c/n as they played only to look back at the road and instinctively slam down on the brakes as my brain processed the human looking creature shambling across the pavement before us.

When the car screeched and jolted to a stop and my mind caught up to the situation I quickly realized my mistake and attempted to press down on the gas. The car didn’t budge. The walker stumbled closer, now about thirty feet away. I turned the key in the ignition to off, then back on. More walkers, so many, began to emerge from the tree line. It wouldn’t turn over.

Y/c/n was silent in the back seat, watching in wide eyed fear as the monsters inched ever closer. I quickly motioned for them to lie flat on the floor of the car while I scrambled for the only weapon within my immediate reach, got out of the car, and hurriedly locked the doors behind me, hoping against hope that I could get us – get y/c/n - out of this safely.

So there I was. Standing atop the roof of a car (a small child quietly hidden inside said car) armed with nothing but the broken off pole of a wooden broom and attempting to single-handedly fight off a herd of walkers.

I’d been managing to keep the swarm at bay for a short while, stabbing those closest to me in the head as best as I could, but I was severely outnumbered. I guessed there must have been something like thirty or so walkers surrounding us, but to be honest I was a bit too preoccupied to properly count them.

Suddenly, one of the dead managed to grab hold of my pant leg and pull. It wasn’t enough to drag me from my perch, but enough to knock me off balance causing me to lose grip of my makeshift spear in my resulting moment of panic. I could hear y/c/n let out a soft whimper of fear from where they lay inside the car. It felt like I was watching a movie scene in slow motion as my only real weapon, unconventional as it was, teetered off the edge of the rooftop before disappearing into a sea of the undead.

Dread settled low in my stomach as I realized what had just happened. We were truly and utterly fucked.

As hands clambered at my feet, and hungry jaws snapped too close for comfort, and I wondered what in the fuck I was going to do now, my eyes drifted across the crowd of monsters, landing upon the corpse of a small boy, whose body was torn open at the gut. He was wearing ragged pajamas that appeared to have once depicted dinosaurs, but were now torn, threadbare, and coated in a thick layer of grime. In his hand he still clutched an equally derelict stuffed bear.

Something inside of me snapped.

Determination boiled anew in my veins and suddenly I was fighting again. Kicking the walker closest to me in the face once, twice, three times before it went down in a shower of gore.

I could do this. For my child? I could do anything.

“Yeah, that’s right, fucker! You just fuck right the hell off, asshole!”, I yelled as the geek fell.

I don’t know how long it went on, and I quickly lost track of how many I took down. I just kept kicking, yelling, and fighting with every ounce of strength I possessed. It was only when I looked up from the most recently fallen undead to take on the next that I found that the road was littered with walker remains and not a one was left standing.

I slowly climbed down from atop the car, already feeling the adrenaline rapidly leave my system. I retrieved my fallen spear from where I’d spotted it peaking out from beneath a rotting torso, before the car door burst open and my arms were full with the only thing that really mattered in this desolate world.

“Mama!”, their little voice cried as they latched their small arms around my neck.

I stood, hoisting y/c/n onto my hip, and allowed myself one moment to bask in the comfort of knowing that my child was safe in my arms for one more day.

In that moment, I just let myself breathe, stroking my fingers through y/c/n’s y/c/h/c hair and letting the relief that I was alive, that we were still alive, begin to sink in.“Holy shit.”

“I’d say that about sums it up, yes.”, a masculine voice sounded from behind me.

I quickly spun round, shielding the child in my arms from potential threat as best as I could given the circumstances, to see a small group of people on horseback slow to a stop in the road before us. All were clad in armor, looking for all the world like post-apocalyptic knights. One man, with dark skin, a kind face, and long dreadlocks more salt than pepper, whom I assumed to be their leader, slowly dismounted his stead, raising his hands up in a gentle surrender as he did so.

“We mean you no ill will, my Lady.”, the man assured. “ I apologize, my people and I did not mean to frighten you. We were traveling along the road and heard you fending off the dead, thought perhaps you were in need of aid. It seems, however, that you had it under control.”, the man finished, with no small amount of awe.

I simply observed this strange group for a moment. They seemed clean, well fed, clearly they had a place – a camp or base of some sort. They also seemed genuine, but I hadn’t made it this long in the new world without knowing that the only beings left in this world more dangerous than the dead were the living. Caution had kept me – had kept y/c/n – alive this far, and I knew better than to trust blindly.

When I stayed silent a beat too long the man spoke again, “I must apologize, it seems my manners have deserted me.”, he gave a wide smile that reached his eyes, extending a hand towards me. “I am King Ezekiel, my comrades and I come from a community not far from here, the Kingdom.”

I paused, briefly wondering if I should take a leap and trust these people, or hop back in the car and pray that the ignition would turn over this time. I felt y/c/n shift in my arms and glanced down to find them peering up at me with big, y/c/e/c eyes full of trust and I knew that I had to give a little. I had to at least see if there was a chance of finding somewhere to resemble home. They deserved that.

After all, we could still run if things went south; I was good at that.

“Y/n. And this is y/c/n.”, I said, cautiously extending my hand to meet this so called ‘King’s’.

Ezekiel grasped it, but instead of the handshake I was expecting, he brought to his lips and pressed a gentle kiss to my knuckles instead, “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lady Y/n.”

In his eyes I saw nothing but kindness and honesty, and so when he asked, “Would the two of you perhaps like to come with us back to our community?”, I knew I was making the right choice when I replied, “Yes.”

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what's the headcannon

Okay but can you imagine being an NPC in the world of Vox Machina. Like, maybe you're an isolated farmer or something and you're whole town gets fucking vored by dragons, but since you live outside of the town you're safe. And you just watch as these dragons start to infest the empty town and the surrounding area, and you're scared to stay but don't have the means to leave. And one day, maybe years after the initial incident, you're out farming when a dragon swoops overhead and it spots you, and that's it, you're fucking dead, but then.

Then. A fucking tiny little white thing gets hurled at it, and it lands next to you and holy shit that's a person and there's more of them, one of them is on a broom and the other has wings holy shit you're all going to die. And then they beat the fucking dragon and turn to you to ask you if you wanted any of it's scales. And you just stare at them and kind of follow dumbly behind as they leave the town.

And because you're stupid and broke and because your house burned down in the chaos you follow them and get killed, maimed, or eaten too many times for your simplistic neutral good sensibilities to handle. And maybe it comes to a head at some point, or Vox Machina does something really fucking dumb, and you just can't take it anymore.

So you hightail it the fuck out of there like a sensible person and get to a town far away from them. And it's fine and dandy because the innkeeper is mildly sympathetic. It's great, really, until you're talking to the librarian and he just, stops. Blinks at you. walks away. and you ask around about his deal but all you learn is that he's new in town but so are you

The next evening the guy comes up to you at the tavern with a story, and he tells you how his sister fought valiantly with Vox Machina and got herself killed by a fucking succubus or something. And your heart goes out to the guy and you share stories and it turns out you both have a lot in common so you decide that hey, it's cheaper to share a room.

You both talk and decide to go to Emon to try and find work and maybe help with the rebuilding (but the gold definitely wouldn't hurt). You gather up your meagre belongings for the journey and start to make your way, both of you praying that you never again cross paths with Vox Machina again.

Somewhere along the line you become really close friends with the guy and trade stories over the fire about the mighty and disastrous Vox Machina. You laugh, and you cry, and you bond quite a bit.

And one morning you wake up to the guy laughing with a woman, and he introduces you to the woman with wonder in his eyes and it's his sister, she's been revived by the tiny white child, apparently she's a cleric and not just a living cannonball.

So you keep traveling towards Emon and you're a little hesitant about this new chick because due to recent events (read: Vox Machina) you've learned to be a little wary of people.

But one night you and her are on watch and the guy is asleep and you're staring at the fire all dramatic-like and she just slams a fist down on her open palm.

"I've got it," she goes and you look at her kinda funny because uh, what?

Some confused noise must escape you because she turns to you from the log she's sitting on and smiles.

"We should start a support group," she says with a swig of her flask. And okay, that's not technically the weirdest thing she's ever said, but uh, what?

"Support group?" you ask. "For what?"

She eyes you disbelievingly. "'For what,'" she mimics, rolling her eyes. "For surviving Vox Machina, that's what."

You roll your eyes and laugh, but for some reason the idea sticks. You're all deeply fucked up from Vox Machina (good though they might be, trauma isn't inherently evil so it really only makes sense that they'd cause some), why not be fucked up together?

Eventually you and your dude friend and his sister decide to go through the steps to make it official. The sister even becomes a liscensed psychologist. "I knew I got that degree for something," she'd say over a bottle of wine, laughing near-hysterically.

And finally, after far too much trekking, the three of you make it to Emon. And the place is a disaster, most people gone and the few remaining trying to rebuild and recover what they can.

You sigh, and make youway towards the inn. Along the way, the three of you stumble across a child trapped under a piece of a fallen building. She's screaming for help and you're not sure you want to lend it but then you see the blood pooling around her face and the "good" part of your classification kicks into gear. You and your two friends join forces and drag the child out of the rubble and to the nearest group of people. They're a group of search-and-rescuers, it turns out, and they hire you on the spot.

Can you image the look of horror on your own face as you pull out pieces of charred and crushed limbs or, Istus forbid, an entire corpse. The work itself is grueling, and along with the trauma it only takes you three a couple of days before you decide it just isn't worth it.

So you leave quietly, simply telling your boss of your resignation on the last day. You all go together, for good measure. But your boss doesn't yell or demand payment or anything. He just sighs and invites the three of you for a drink. He tells you about his family, a little girl and a little boy and his blind wife, who didn't make it. He drones about his neighbors and the butcher who's son ran away for dreams of heroics. You all listen because it's the polite thing to do and your friend only falls asleep a little throughout the story.

Then he gets to the darker bits. He tells you about a woman who came through who said the dragons were sent by a dark and sinister group. A group called Vox Machina.

The sister laughs before you can respond. She chuckles and giggles and heaves. Then, when she wipes the tears from her eyes, she looks your (ex-) boss right in the face and tells him no.

"Vox Machina did a lot of shit to the world. Did a lot of shit to me, too. But this?" She gestures over to a fallen schoolhouse. "I bet my life they didn't do this."

You find yourself nodding. "They were fighting dragons at my village. Don't know what'd make them do this."

The man looks unsure of himself. He looks young, despite the lines of worry and fear driven into his face and he looks so, so lost.

"Hey," you start to say, because you're stupid. "Why don't you come with us?"

He sighs. "I have a dog. Used to be my wife's service dog, that Clover. I can't leave her here, but she's only got three legs."

Your friend perks up. "I love dogs. We can take her... And you, of course."

And that's how you, your friend, your friend's sister, your ex-boss, and his dog named Clover decide to go to Whitestone.

"Why Whitestone?" you ask when your boss suggests it.

"It's where those bumbling buffoons are based," he goes, and he can only mean Vox Machina. "We'll learn the truth and have more people to join," he says, because obviously you've let him in on the support group. (Clover is an honorary member and a therapy animal.)

So you trek there and only almost die getting there twice (which is a new low-record).

Whitestone is...perfect. It's strong, firmly built, tall but not loomy, and it rinds you of the town you used to live by. Of the town you used to live in.

And there are dozens of new members. The librarians have there own Vox Machina support club that your friend gladly joins, the guard has one too, and you take in at least ten new members every day for the first week. Long story, short story, Vox Machina are pretty good at fucking people up.

Your old boss, for his part, finds his answers in the form of a young blonde boy who sighs at the questions of Vox Machina's morals. He sighs and lays his head against the doorframe, looking far too tired for his age.

"I.. My father used to be a butcher, down in Emon," he starts and you all pause. None of you have told anyone about your work in Emon or the story about the heroic butcher's son. Because of this, you listen, and you hear the horrors of Anna Ripley and the betrayal of the young blonde soldier.

That night, Kynan Leore becomes a member.

It's only a week later that the people tell you. One of the lower-class merchants who lost an eye in the protests of the Briarwoods, looks at your flyer for the group and shakes her head.

"It's not that it ain't a great idea, hon. Bit you gotta know it ain't smart, making a club for that when the ruler of Whitestone is who she is."

Shit. You ask her and learn with slowly dawning horror the identity of one Lady Cassandra, sister to Percival de Rolo, the gunslinger of Vox Machina. Fuck. You are unbelievably screwed.

You talk to your crew and you all contemplate leaving but eventually you decide to stay. Still, you live in fear of the day you meet Cassandra Johanna von Mussel Klossowski de Rolo and you avoid anywhere near the castle grounds like it's got Vox Machina in it - which, considering the Lady de Rolo's family, it just might.

Eventually, it all comes to a head.

Maybe it's because an employee of the castle wants to meet but can only do so on the job, but for whatever reason, you have to go to the castle and no one else can make it. So you go, hesitant and beyond terrified of the Lady of the House of Whitestone, and you talk to the servant and maybe they join and you see Kynan Leore on the way out and you start up a conversation and then he looks behind you and pales a little and

"Kynan. Is this one of the people you were telling me about?" someone, definitely female, asks, and Kynan looks so apologetic and you're suddenly certain that this is Cassandra de Rolo, and that's it, you're all dead, you survived the dragons but you can't survive the vehement sister.

You turn around slowly.

It is Cassandra de Rolo, and she's...actually younger than you'd thought. Far younger, but just as terrifying. She leads you firmly to a seat and you, Kynan, and her all sit down for a cup of tea.

You're shaking in your boots. This isn't a game, like it might've been in the beginning. You could get killed for your group, and you can't help but feel that'd be a stupid way to die.

Eventually, after much hesitation, the Ruler of Whitestone lowers her cup, looks you dead in the eye, and sighs a long sigh.

"I hate to ask this," she starts, and this is it, you're done for, and oh fuck your friends are gonna be so mad, Clover's gonna kick your ass so hard with all three of her legs oh fuck

"But, I heard about you all from Kynan, and... Well, are you still accepting new members?"

And yes, yes you are.

Like yesterday

{“It’s very lucky he picked tonight, you know,” said Hermione as they climbed fully dressed into their sleeping bags and propped themselves on their elbows to talk. “The one night we weren’t in the tower….”

“I reckon he’s lost track of time, being on the run," said Ron. “Didn’t realize it was Halloween. Otherwise he’d have come bursting in here.���} – [Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban]

What if the dangerous criminal Sirius Black hadn’t lost track of time at all?

[Read on Ao3]

__________________________________

Like yesterday

“Let me in,” he demanded.

The Fat Lady crossed her arms, glaring at him. “Not without the password,” she retorted, firm.

“I said let me in!” yelled the man, grabbing the frame so tight that his knuckles whitened in the useless attempt to rip it out of the wall.

“I won’t move,” said the Fat Lady with fierceness, but she shirked in horror and fled when the sharp blade of a pocket knife plunged into her canvas, tearing it apart, slashing it into strips that littered the floor.

Sirius walked through the portrait hole and emerged in a wide, deserted room. Comfy armchair and red sofas surrounded the hearth, where a crackling fire had been lit to warm up the air.

He reached the couch before the mantlepiece to run a hand on the ruby fabric, and the rage that had washed over in him faded away while the ache in his chest swelled, cutting his breath off. He fell on his knees, his eyes shut to bite back the tears, his hands clenched on the pillow where James had sat so many times, laughing and grinning and living.

Sirius startled when something brushed his fingers, and he found himself staring at the ginger cat that had become his only friend. It was hard to ignore the vice grip seizing his heart, but Sirius forced himself to get up, chasing away the insane yearn of clinging to that pillow forever.

Finding Peter had to come first – Harry had to come first, and ensuring he was safe was the only way he had to honor James’ and Lily’s sacrifice and trust.

“Where is he?” he asked to the grumpy cat, his voice hoarse.

The cat meowed in disappointment, looking insistently at the portrait hole. Sirius swore and kicked an armchair, painfully aware that his chance to catch Peter had probably just gone to hell. Who the fuck would bring a rat to the Halloween feast?

“Show me where he stays,” he said through gritted teeth.

The cat looked at him with a cold stare, probably offended by his rude manner, but eventually he moved towards the boys’ dorms, his tail held straight in the air.

Sirius followed him along the spiral staircase, but stopped in his track when he walked before the door of his old dorm.

Ignoring the annoyed meowing coming from the floor above, Sirius took a deep breath and grabbed the handle, opening the door.

As the common room, the dorm was virtually identical, even if there were two beds more than he was used to. Where Sirius had hung motionless posters of muggle women and motorcycles, somebody had put pictures of his favorite Quidditch team, and a bunch of shoes were throw in the corner where James’ silver broom holder once stood, but the beds were still four-poster, the curtains still red, the trunks still placed at the foot of the beds.

Sirius’ gaze wandered on the floor, looking for the spot that had hidden their secret for so long.

He had once mocked James for wanting it to be accessible without a wand – “We should be able to access it in our Animagus form too!”, he had claimed – but now Sirius felt deeply grateful for James’ imaginative mind. He kneeled and put a hand on the intersection between the four tiles. I solemnly swear I’m up to no good.

An instant later the tiles disappeared.

The four footprints they had imprinted on the concrete where still there, all different from each other, all real except for the one of the werewolf that had required a certain amount of magic to be faithfully reproduced.

Sirius ran his fingers upon it, then moved slowly to Prongs’, tracing with his fingertips the only hoof-shaped footprint of the lot.

Twelve years since the day he had found James’ and Lily’s corpse, and it still hurt like it was yesterday.

Finally, Padfoot let the tears flow, and for an insane moment he hoped Moony would come to cry with him.

***

Remus kept staring at the torn canvas of the Fat Lady while the Gryffindor students were lead back to the Great Hall. His heart was pounding, Peeves’ words echoing in is head. Nasty temper he’s got, that Sirius Black.

It was Dumbledore to shake him from his stupor.

“Severus, I need you to gather all the Slytherins in the Great Hall, if you please,” said the Headmaster. Snape sent Remus a suspicious glare, but eventually nodded and stepped away.

“Remus,” resumed Dumbledore, “I have to speak with the students and the other Head of Houses, since Minerva is looking for the Fat Lady. Can I ask you to start searching for Black in the Gryffindor Tower?”

“Of course,” said Remus, his voice a bit hoarse.

“Very well, then. Start from here and then check wherever you find more suitable. After all, you are the one to know him better.”

Or so I believed, thought Remus, but nodded nonetheless.  

He entered the common room holding his wand high in front of him. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but he was still surprised to find it exactly as he remembered it, and with nothing amiss. A deep wave of aching nostalgia washed over him. A lump formed in his throat when memories of the days spent at Hogwarts with his friends overcame him, but nothing could bring back what Sirius had so painstakingly managed to tear apart.

Remus swallowed, trying to shove those thoughts aside. He needed to focus. He needed to find him. “Homenum revelio.”

Nothing happened, and for a fleeting moment Remus wondered if that spell would have worked if Sirius was in his Animagus form, but he whisked the thought away. It couldn’t have been so simple to get in, that couldn’t be it – Sirius must have used some complex Dark Arts, probably something that Voldemort himself had taught him.

The thought made Remus realise that Sirius might know a way to avoid being detected by that spell, so he took a deep breath and begun thoroughly searching the room.

When he was confident that Sirius wasn’t there, Remus walked towards the boys’ staircase. He was confident that had been Sirius’ destination, since Harry slept there, and anyway, the Marauders had never discovered how to bypass the girls’ dorm wards. Even in the improbable case that Voldemort had told Sirius how to enter there, Remus couldn’t see why he would have.

He searched for Sirius dorm by dorm, using the Hominum Revelio spell again before entering and double-checking with his eyes, looking under the beds, behind the curtains, in the loos.

When only a flight of steps separated him from his old dorm, Remus took a deep breath and then kept going. His heart skipped a beat when he saw that the door was open unlike all the rest, and when Remus finally stood before it, blood pumped fast in his veins, because it was impossible to miss the spot on the floor where the tiles were missing, showing four footprints impressed on the concrete.

Sirius had been there. He had been close, so close, and Remus couldn’t believe that he had missed him, that the traitor had dared coming in their dorm and uncovering their footprints.

Sirius must have fled after hearing the students coming back from the feast, assumed Remus, because otherwise he couldn’t explain why Sirius had left their secret exposed like that, for everybody to see – not that the fact Sirius was an Animagus could explain how he had got inside Hogwarts or out of Azkaban.

Unless… unless he had left it open for Remus… to remind him how much Black had taken for him, the same night of twelve years ago…

Of one thing Remus was sure, though – he couldn’t afford to let other people find out. He entered in the room, his gaze fixed on the floor to prevent other memories to overwhelm him.

He kneeled down, running his fingers upon Prongs’ and Wormtail’s footprints.

Mischief Managed, he thought, letting a single tear dropping on the floor.

__________________________________

[Read the companion pieces on Ao3 – October 31st serie]

[Read them on tumblr: With the tail between his legs; Silence]

2020

Hello. I hope you and yours are well. As is tradition, below are my selections for albums and songs of the year. As I have yet to receive a reply from you, dear reader, sincerely asking to unsubscribe, you are therefore the proud recipient of the list once more! I’ve altered the format from 5 tracks each month because, as I suspect many of you did, I went into a nostalgic hole for large chunks of this year (for me this consisted of at least two months of nothing but Funkadelic, which does mean my personalised algorithm is now ace), but also when I looked back at when many of these tracks were released it was front heavy for the first half of the year – another body blow to the supposed “monthly” mailer. I even considered not writing my one-liners, but where is the fun in that? Furthermore, trying to keep the long list to 60 tracks in total (equivalent to 5 per month) proved overly frustrating, so I’ve included some extras, especially as this year felt 13 month long. Notwithstanding said excuses, enough preamble, on with the list! Let me know what you think and do send me your own selections. Lots of love xx TOP 10s TOP 10 ALBUMS Baxter Dury – The Night Chancers Mildlife – Automatic SAULT – Untitled (Black Is) Alice Boman – Dream On Kanaan – Odense Sessions Lightning Orchestra – Source And Deliver Yves Tumor – Heaven To A Tortured Mind The Strokes – The New Abnormal Woods – Strange to Explain Erland Cooper – Hether Blether TOP 10 TRACKS Malena Zavala – En la Noche Caribou – You & I Yves Tumor – Kerosene! Puscifer – Apocalyptical Mildlife – Automatic King Hannah – Meal Deal SAULT – Wildfires // Bow [yes, there are two tracks there] Kanaan – Urgent Excursions To the Tundrasphere Frazey Ford – Golden Jessie Ware – What’s Your Pleasure? NEW MUSIC ‘MONTHLY’ MAILER Spotify Link Here Holy Fuck – Near Mint What better way to kick off a retrospective look at 2020 than with ‘Holy Fuck’ Alice Boman – It’s OK, It’s Alright Really love this album and this pick is a real downer, spectral and haunting but also touching Smoke Fairies – Out Of The Woods Jessica and Katherine still delivering a decade on, the chorus guitar riff is tops Nicolas Godin – The Border Air’s Nicolas Godin doing his best detached friendly robot, mais bien sur Moses Boyd – BTB Vibrant, propulsive, energetic, gotta move! The Men – Wading In Dirty Water Avid readers will know I’m a fan of these guys and this one rides a familiar Crazy Horse choogle Tame Impala – Breathe Deeper Funky bass, piano flourishes, solid synths, all groove Kanaan – Urgent Excursions To the Tundrasphere Ok, here it is, there’s always going to be at least one – this is the 14 min space rock jam – skip/enjoy! Frazey Ford – Golden This production is right up my street, soulful vocals swoop around tight rhythm section and hammond keys, an analogue dream Caribou – You and I From the analogue to a digital master, man this beat is catchy Pulled By Magnets – Cold Regime People Die File this under terrifying experimental jazz Jonathan Wilson – Riding The Blinds JW doing that 6/8 minor ballad thang Baxter Dury – Say Nothing Another album I loved this year and could have picked any number of tracks, so here’s a quote from Baxter: “My craft and in a sense a certain style has been perfected and it’s easy… I don’t have to do it again basically. I don’t want to hear another man talking over an orchestral background.” Ha! U.S. Girls – 4 American Dollars Slick funky, soulful, classic strings, building into a brilliant outro with great lyrics Deeper – Lake Song Detached vibe ala Joy Division / The Cure done through a Pavement lens with serious downer lyrics Pretty Lightning – Voo Doo Boo Swampy dirge guitar grooves Tamikrest – Anha Achal Wad Namda Another mailer favourite, Touareg guitar wizards Tony Allen, Hugh Masekela – Never (Lagos Never Gonna Be the Same) Master drummer who sadly passed away earlier this year just after this release, and two years after master trumpeter Masekela’s own passing, this track is a buzzing tribute to Fela Myrkur – House Carpenter Danish black metaller does Scandinavian folk: bright and beautiful Sufjan Stevens, Lowell Brams – The Runaround A weird album, even by Sufjan standards, but I found these electronic ambient sounds strangely comforting R.A.P. Ferreira – ABSOLUTES Rhythm & poetry The Weeknd – Blinding Lights What can I add to the smash of 2020? Catchy af Porridge Radio – Long Indie banger, with a decidedly angry, bitter, playful lyrics Cleo Sol – Her Light If online research is to be believed Cleo is part of the collective in SAULT with producer Inflo, but this album is standalone brilliance without knowing that, this is pure vintage soul vibes Malena Zavala – En la Noche I returned to this track more than any other this year, the rhythm, the vocals, the melody, the production, even if I have to use google translate to fully understand the lyrics Tom Misch, Yussef Dayes – Lift Off Molten guitar, groovy arrangements, and plenty of business from Dayes Yves Tumor – Kerosene! An absolute belter, amazing vocals, groove and crescendo perfection Warm Digits, The Orielles – Shake The Wheels Off (feat. The Orielles) Immediate synth pop, indie dancefloor (with some solid cowbell) EOB – Brasil First solo venture for Ed, acoustic folk gives way to rumbling bass banger, would very much like to experience this in a field Other Lives – Hey Hey I Grand rocking orchestral aural assault with hints of Morricone Elephant Tree – Sails Fulfilling the heavy dirge quota, that hit at 2:33 is a proper head in the speakers moment The Strokes – Why Are Sundays So Depressing This album snuck up on me, and then I found myself listening to it non-stop, this track such an ear worm Houses of Heaven – In Soft Confusion I think the right descriptor is darkwave – insistent drum machine, reverb soaked vocals, industrial production, gloomy pop hooks Joel Sarakula – Don’t Give Up on Me Operating in a dangerous space between homage and pastiche, groove and parody, this is smooth easy yacht rock Donny Benét – Second Dinner Following hot on the heels of pastiche, this time with tongue firmly in cheek, The Don and his 80s reverence lolz Perfume Genius – Whole Life Completely arresting, the lyrics an absolute gut punch, yet still gorgeous Jake Blount – Beyond This Wall From the press release, this album “features fourteen carefully chosen tracks drawn from Blount’s extensive research of Black and Indigenous mountain music. The result is an unprecedented testament to the voices paradoxically obscured yet profoundly ingrained into the Appalachian tradition” – this contemporary instrumental is a superb banjo and fiddle tune Holy Hive – Broom Formed by the drummer from the Dap Tones and inspired by being on tour with Lee Fields, this gentle soul, complete with tremolo guitar and horns, really floats Woods – Where Do You Go When You Dream A welcome return to form, this mellotron infused number is beautifully catchy Erland Cooper – Linga Holm Dramatic piano and strings from an altogether wild and wonderful album Mystery Jets – Screwdriver Loud / quiet dynamic, bombastic riffs, seething verses, the Jets turn it up to eleven to fight with love Jehnny Beth – Flower Another track where hushed verses give way to chorus explosions, serious tension and intensity Hinds – Good Bad Times Love that thudding bass drum, big stomping pop Norah Jones – Were You Watching? Smooth but haunting, with added Celtic flavour Braids – Young Buck Bleeps and bloops, melancholic poppy vocals, and the damnedest catchiest chorus Jessie Ware – What’s Your Pleasure? Is it getting hot in here? No further questions LA Priest – What Moves Quirky strutting electro, sleek yet squelchy SAULT – Wildfires + SAULT, Michael Kiwanuka – Bow Double billing because I couldn’t make a choice (plus when I realised the rhythms flow perfectly into one another it’s like it’s one song) Run The Jewels – a few words for the firing squad (radiation) Again, difficult to choose which track on this album; this is pure fire with sax and all GUM – The Thrill Of Doing It Right Turn this feel good banger up! Such a big hit when the horns drop at the start The Vacant Lots - Fracture Catchy, icy, synths (and Desert Sands label mates by the by) A.A. Williams – Melt Enchanting slow-burning, stirring post-rock, with a wonderful, soaring crescendo Lightning Orchestra – For Those Who Are Yet To Be Born A late discovery, but immediately catapulted to the top, self-described “psychedelic booty-shake” Kamaal Williams – Save Me Almost chose ‘Pigalle’ but the tight push drumming on this won out, hard funky jazz stylings of the Herbie variety Victoria Monét – Dive Lavish and groovy, and as Monét puts it: “They say most humans are about 60% water, but I believe women must be 69% so dive in baby." Secret Machines – Talos’ Corpse Genuinely so happy to see Brandon and Josh back and still with the big sounds All Them Witches – Enemy of My Enemy Relentlessly heavy, all the chops and described by one reviewer as the love child of TOOL, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Kyuss; I love this band Fenne Lily – Birthday Beautiful and bruised Mildlife – Automatic Another new discovery, in the pocket cosmic goodness and much as it pains me to quote from NME I can’t think of a better description than ‘Mobius strip funk’ Puscifer – Apocalyptical Maynard in the video for this track is an indelible image; massive swaggering Intruder-esque drums, angular menacing guitars, Carina’s ethereal edgy vocals, Maynard’s gritted teeth whispers, and apposite apocalyptical lyrics Matt Berninger – Loved So Little Confessional moody acoustic conjuring up Western-esque vistas Goldensuns – Denandra Moore Californian sun-drenched lo-fi groove, for fans of Conan Mockasin and Night Moves Frankie and the Witch Fingers – Cavehead F*cking excellent west coast garage psych melange and the B,D,E ascend at 3:10 is nod central King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – The Hungry Wolf Of Fate Genre bending brilliance once again from down under, this cut a heavy, doomy Sabbath assault King Hannah – Meal Deal Ominous drone opens into an acoustic tale of buying a flat with a spider in the bath, Hannah’s sinister smoky sultry vocals draw you in, before some menacing low frequency dirge guitar and drums kick in at 1:30… By this point on first listen I was already hooked, but then comes a great walloping Angel Olsen ‘Sister’ style crescendo, a glorious find at the end of the year (props to Manuel) HONOURABLE MENTIONS Elephant Stone – I See You Sam Lee, Elizabeth Frazer – The Moon Shines Bright Priscilla Ermel – Martim Pescador Rheinzand – Blind Dogleg – Fox The Flaming Lips, Deap Lips – Home Thru Hell The Heliocentrics – Hanging By A Thread Midwife – 2018 Chicano Batman – Color My life Trace Mountains – Rock & Roll Peach Pit – Shampoo Bottles Buscabulla – Vámono Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever – Cars In Space Jess Williamson – Wind on Tin Thiago Nassif, Arto Lindsay – Plástico The Vacant Lots – Endless Rain Nubya Garcia – Stand With Each Other (Feat. Ms MAURICE, Cassie Kinoshi, & Richie Seivwright) Juanita Stein – L.O.T.F. Carlton Melton – Waylay Paul McCartney – Long Tailed Winter Bird

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

Atlantic City covers the northern third of Absecon Island, a barrier island made up of an alarming amount of sand. It is a bad town to die in — there are plenty of vacant lots but no cemeteries. In many places, if you dig down more than eight feet you hit water. A couple blocks away from the beach, the Absecon Lighthouse is built on a submerged wooden foundation for exactly that reason — so long as you keep wood wet and away from oxygen, it won’t rot. “We haven’t tipped yet,” said Buddy Grover, the 91-year-old lighthouse keeper, “but it does sway in the wind sometimes.”

“The problem with barrier islands is that, sort of by definition, they move,” said Dan Heneghan. Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. He retired this past May. He’s a big, friendly guy with a mustache like a push broom and a habit of lowering his voice and pausing near the end of his sentences, as if he’s telling you a ghost story. (“Atlantic City was, in mob parlance … a wide open city. No one family … controlled it.”) We were standing at the base of the lighthouse, which he clearly adores. He’s climbed it 71 times this year. “I don’t volunteer here, I just climb the steps,” he said. “It’s a lot more interesting than spending time on a Stairmaster.” The lighthouse was designed by George Meade, a Civil War general most famous for defeating Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. It opened in 1857 but within 20 years the beach had eroded to such an extent that the water was only 75 feet away from the base. Jetties were added until the beach was built back out, but a large iron anchor sits at the old waterline, either as a reminder or a threat.

A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. My first night there I met a woman named Juliana Lykins who told me about Tucker’s Island — New Jersey’s first seaside resort, which had been slowly overtaken by the sea until it disappeared completely. This was a month before the election. The “grab ’em by the pussy” tape had just broken, it was pouring rain, the city was on the verge of defaulting on its debts, and 2,000 casino workers were about to lose their jobs. At the time — my clothes soaking wet, falling asleep in a Super 8 to the sound of Scottie Nell Hughes on CNN — it was hard to understand what Lykins was saying as anything other than a metaphor for the country. I missed the larger menace and focused on the immediate. Trump was elected obviously, but Tucker’s Island wasn’t a figurative threat; it was a very straightforward story about what happens to coastal communities when the water moves in.

Last June, NOAA released a report on high-tide flooding in the United States over the course of 2017. Atlantic City and Boston were tied for second place with 22 days of flooding from high tide alone. The only metro area more affected, with 23 days of flooding, was Sabine Pass, which sits on the Gulf Coast, where Texas meets Louisiana. “Sea level rise is very spatially dependent,” said Maya Buchanan. Buchanan is the resident expert on sea level rise at Climate Central, a research center based in Princeton, New Jersey. “So even New Jersey and New York are expected to have a different amount [of flooding] because there’s a lot of different factors. Some of them are global, some are regional, and some are very, very local.” New York is built on bedrock — metamorphic rock specifically, once incredibly hard and hot; that’s why so few dinosaur fossils have been found in the city. New Jersey’s soil is considerably more porous. “Atlantic City in particular,” said Buchanan, “but even New Jersey writ large, are expected to experience more sea level rise than the global mean.”

*

The decade since the recession has been rough for everyone except the wealthiest, but here the recession was a disaster. According to the South Jersey Economic Review, more than 25,000 jobs were lost in the past decade and the city’s real GDP declined by 21.4 percent between 2006 and 2015, the largest dip of any metro area in the country. Five casinos shut down in two years, and the day after the 2016 election the city was taken over by the state in order to avoid default. Oliver Cooke, an economics professor at nearby Stockton University, has referred to the past 10 years as Atlantic City’s “lost decade.”

The shuttered casinos — windowless basements filled with slot machines — were perfect for a lab.

For the first time in a while things are looking up. Last year violent crime and property crime were down 36 percent since 2017 according to the Atlantic City Police Department, and the boardwalk was markedly busier this past summer. The only place Trump’s name still appears in the city is on an old mural in the bus station, and the shuttered Trump Taj Mahal reopened as a Hard Rock Café in June. Come hell or high water, it is always sort of 2005 in South Jersey (a lot of Simple Plan on the radio) and the Hard Rock is designed to capitalize on that. In place of the Taj Mahal’s famous chandelier is a giant guitar, and what was once a jewelry store has been reborn as a shrine to Boomers called the “Rock Vault.” A Kramer Pacer, painted in the style of acid-wash jeans, hangs on the wall. bon jovi, it says. new jersey. As far as I could tell the only holdover from the Trump Taj was a sandwich chain called White House Subs, although it’s unclear whether or not that’s a nod to the president. When I walked by, a man was standing at the counter wearing a Rob Zombie T-shirt that read, 100% corpse fucking flesh eating zombie loving god damn son of a bitch.

It’s a start, but the reality is that people don’t gamble the way they used to. According to a YouGov poll from May 2018, 47 percent of millennials find casinos “depressing,” and next door to the Hard Rock, where the former Revel has reopened as the Ocean Resort, business was much quieter. The Ocean is visually striking — an enormous mass of curved glass — but it doesn’t seem to have a real identity besides ‘playing a lot of Frank Sinatra’ and several of the pushcart operators that work on the boardwalk told me they’d placed bets on how long it will last. As I was walking past, a woman asked a couple if it was as beautiful inside as it is from the boardwalk.

“Not really,” they said.

*

A little more than three years ago, as hope for a revival began to ebb, an architecture firm called Perkins+Will proposed a plan. Within the range of plans for Atlantic City, this one was unique — it was responsible. Atlantic City is four square miles, about the size of some college campuses. The shuttered casinos — windowless basements filled with slot machines — were perfect for a lab. The idea was to take the city’s vulnerability to the sea and turn it into an asset. Atlantic City would become a global hub for climate science, casinos gradually replaced with laboratories, the convention center reinvented as a training ground for civic leaders. “We weren’t talking about abandoning Atlantic City,” said David Green, one of the primary architects behind the project. “We were talking about repurposing it and bringing in academic and research partners to kind of rehabilitate the area as a kind of research hub.” Scientists would study ecological changes, sociological changes, and the way different kinds of buildings respond to sea level rise. One of the central parts of the plan was something Green called The Line, which would be a physical reminder of the changing coast and a way to make clear to the public what was happening. “You’re testing not just the physical community, but social community elements,” said Green. It was a good idea, but maybe a couple years ahead of its time. Climate change hadn’t settled into the national consciousness yet, and in the confusion of casino closings and the 2016 election Green’s plan failed to gain traction with local politicians and eventually died off.

*

In the early 1950s, two writers for the New York Daily Mirror named Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer published a book of all-American gossip (communists! grift!) called U.S.A. Confidential. New Jersey did not fare well. “There is no such place as New Jersey,” they wrote. “It is a breeding bed, playground and refuse dump for New York and Philadelphia and a refuge for their criminals. It is a highway between the two great cities. Few who use it ever stop off or look behind its billboards. If they did, they’d see plenty of ugliness.”

There is no such place as New Jersey. Pretty harsh! But Atlantic City leaned into it, learned to monetize it. The referendum to bring in casinos, paradigmatic non-places, was passed in 1976, but their success was contingent upon maintaining a duopoly between Atlantic City and Vegas. Once gambling was legalized in New York, Connecticut, and (especially) Pennsylvania, things started to decline. “What happened was that we lost the convenience gambler,” said Heneghan, “and that was a big chunk of the market. The regulators in Pennsylvania, I think very, very wisely on their part, chose sites close to the [Delaware] river to kind of create a barrier. With apologies to Winston Churchill, there was a casino curtain drawn around New Jersey.”

The city has been struggling to develop a coherent comeback plan for years. Last June, Philly Mag ran a feature on the arrival of John Longacre — a developer and bar owner who helped gentrify South Philly and is looking to open a bar in Atlantic City. Others are looking to esports — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority is in the process of finalizing a deal to install 6,000 square feet of secure servers in the city, and souvenir shops prominently display shirts that read do you even fortnite bro? Because most of the esports audience is underage, it won’t exactly bring an economic boom, though. The New York Times threw its money on sports betting, which was legalized in New Jersey in June and could help bring in revenue during the city’s lean winter months. None of these reports mention climate change.

You gotta be up the whole night just to push the water out. Unless you got a big-ass vacuum to suck it up, you gotta do it with a broom.

Heneghan, like everyone else I spoke to, doubts that sports betting will be enough to fix the city’s economic problems. At the time we spoke, the only nearby states in which it was legal were Jersey and Delaware. But Rhode Island legalized it in October, Pennsylvania in November, and New York and Connecticut are expected to follow suit in 2019. Essentially, it’s the casino curtain all over again. “I think sports betting will generate some additional revenue,” said Heneghan,“but it’s not the panacea, no.” When I asked him what the city wants to be, he had trouble answering. We were standing at the top of the lighthouse now, overlooking the Absecon Inlet — once called Graveyard Inlet because of the frequency of shipwrecks — and the small section of the boardwalk that was destroyed in Sandy. “I remember in January of ’76 I went to a meeting with the local press corps and one of the city commissioners was the speaker,” Heneghan said. “He was an older guy who had been a member of the governor’s cabinet and had been state commissioner of banking. This was before casinos and he was kind of bemoaning how quiet things were in Atlantic City. He said when he was a kid, Atlantic City was a place to go to with somebody you shouldn’t be seen with. Do things you couldn’t do at home.” The bars, Heneghan reminded me, never close here.

*

Last spring, Climate Central published a report on the injustice inherent to Atlantic City’s floods, focusing on a single block called Arizona Avenue. The casinos are protected by large dunes and the Army Corps recently finished building a sea wall with recovery funds from Sandy. Along the back bay though, residents largely rely on aging, undersized bulkheads, and where there are vacant lots there’s often no barrier at all. Things have not improved much over the past year.

“They’re always saying ‘We’re trying to work on it, the sewer systems, blah blah blah,’ but honestly I mean, come on. How do you not make a contingency plan knowing that the bay is right there, the ocean is right here,” said Raymond Mendoza. Mendoza works as a porter and a barback at the Borgata and lives about a block and a half from the back bay. When I met him he was walking a very fat, amiable beagle named Roy. “I’m always worried. When it’s really bad I just watch the tide, ’cause once I see that,” he said, pointing to the water, “come this way, I’m taking my car and driving it right into the casino [parking garage].”

‘Nuisance flooding’ is the technical term for this, but it doesn’t feel adequate. It only takes six inches of fast moving water to topple a grown man. Two feet can sweep a car out to sea. As the water rises so will structural damage. Black mold will spread, kids and the elderly will get sick, and the already debt-ridden National Flood Insurance will edge further toward collapse. “You gotta be up the whole night just to push the water out,” said Neto Alavez. Alavez moved up here from Maryland to work for his uncle’s painting company. “Unless you got a big-ass vacuum to suck it up, you gotta do it with a broom. All they have to say is ‘just go somewhere else.’ They protect all them places over [by the boardwalk]. You know what I’m talking about, the fancy stuff.”

Everyone I met spoke of Hurricane Sandy as the high-water mark for catastrophic flooding, but Sandy — despite the damage it caused — didn’t hit Atlantic City directly, and by the time it made landfall in the Northeast it was only a Category 2 hurricane. There is a pervasive Tale of Two Cities narrative that hangs around Atlantic City — the obscene wealth that circulates within the casinos butting up against dilapidated row houses outside — but the reality is rich people don’t really live in Atlantic City, they just come for conventions. It’s a city of waitresses and bartenders, and many of the residents are elderly. Others moved here after being driven out of Philadelphia and New York by rising rents. Some of them do not have anywhere inland to which they can evacuate. A stronger hurricane, a more direct hit, and people will lose everything.

“A lot of people see sea level rise as just an inundation risk, right? Or this slow problem that’s encroaching,” said Buchanan. “But any flood is basically the summation of sea level and tides and storm surge. Anything that’s adding to that platform just makes a flood that much more likely and it can really increase the frequency and severity of floods.” Last year, scientists at Rice University and Texas A&M released a paper on fossilized coral reefs that showed sea level rise did not happen gradually at the end of the last ice age, but rather in fits and spurts with brief periods of stasis.

Things could get bad here very fast, and all of the revival plans are short-term fixes. We’ve already locked in a certain amount of sea level rise at this point, so for Atlantic City it’s a question of when, not if. According to Climate Central’s risk map, even if we cut carbon emissions to zero yesterday the city would still flood by 2100. It’s likely to happen much sooner, but in that scenario at least, the Borgata is one of the last places above the waterline. Mendoza has been parking his car in the right place.

*

The news was bad this past year. In April, a lawyer named David Buckel lit himself on fire in Prospect Park to protest the world’s continuing use of fossil fuels. In early October, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report warning that we only have until 2040 to drastically alter the world’s economy in order to prevent an effectively uninhabitable planet. In late October, the World Wildlife Foundation released a report estimating that humanity had managed to destroy 60 percent of wildlife since 1970. In November, the deadliest wildfires in a century swept across California. This January, Science released a report that showed oceans were warming 40 percent faster than previously believed. In Atlantic City, a man by the name of David Dichter began petitioning lawmakers to take action. Dichter grew up in Atlantic City and served overseas as a Marine Corps officer and a foreign service officer before retiring. “I think I came back,” he said, “with a pretty good understanding of how screwed up the environment really was.”

Sea level rise did not happen gradually at the end of the last ice age, but rather in fits and spurts with brief periods of stasis … Things could get bad here very fast.

Dichter’s plan was more modest than David Green’s, but the foundational idea was the same: Atlantic City is really going down this time, the question is whether it can figure out a way to make the transition less painful. Dichter focused on tourism — if Atlantic City could position itself as the place for climate conferences, maybe that would lead to bigger things. At the very least it was a way to bring in revenue.

A resolution to turn Atlantic City into a hub for climate science and conventions was passed through the Atlantic City Council, the county freeholders association, and the state legislature, but it’s unclear how committed lawmakers are to specifics just yet. The city was still under state control and about $450 million in debt as of June 2018. The first climate conference took place the weekend of January 25th at the Claridge Hotel, and Dichter has been speaking with David Green about the way things might progress, but it’s been slow going so far. Atlantic City is, for lack of a better term, behaving like Atlantic City. In December, the mayor, Frank Gilliam, was arrested after getting into a fight outside of a casino. (Asked by a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer if he was still mayor, Gilliam replied, “Today.”) A few weeks later he was being investigated by the FBI.

What seems to be lacking at this point is grassroots community involvement. “[The city] should invite the people that organized themselves in Staten Island [after Hurricane Sandy] for the buyout,” said Klaus Jacob. Jacob is a geophysicist and Columbia University’s disaster risk and climate expert. He became somewhat famous for essentially predicting the effects of Hurricane Sandy on New York’s transit system a year before it hit. “It came from the community, it didn’t come from the government. Invite one of those main macho people that organized that neighborhood for a buyout and get a little primer from them. I’m a geophysicist, so what am I talking about here? Not my field of expertise. I just have seen it happening over the last ten, twenty years — where things are moving and where they don’t move … Wherever you look, unless there is a buy-in from neighborhood families — forget it.”

*

Climate change can’t be solved, or really even mitigated, by tourism, and there’s no shortage of people who stand to profit from future disasters. But South Jersey is much poorer than the rest of the state and as the water rises and fire spreads across the West, Dichter and Green’s respective plans might be a way for Atlantic City residents to avoid being lost in the shuffle. Whether or not the city ultimately ends up donating its body to science, there is something oddly endearing about this last push for revenue. There is no such place as New Jersey, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote 70 years ago. Turns out, they weren’t all wrong! The state will be significantly smaller in a hundred years. But if this plan moves forward, Atlantic City — a place that, for all its faults, has always tried to make the best of a bad situation — may at least be able to go out in something like style.

I reported most of this story over the summer, and every time I came back to New York I had to walk through Times Square to get to my subway stop. Mel Chin’s Wake and Unmoored had just opened — an exhibition put on by No Longer Empty and the Queens Museum. Wake was a 60-foot wooden sculpture meant to mirror a sunken ship or a whale’s ribcage, and Unmoored added context. Chin had paired with Microsoft to create a VR rendering of what Manhattan might someday look like should climate change go unchecked. When you put on the VR glasses boats began to float above you, crowding the airspace until they suddenly disappeared in a rush of plankton. It was a little too obvious and the boats looked like something out of Minecraft, but it was effective in spite of itself. The water is already above our heads, we just can’t see it yet.

* * *

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer and a bookseller based in Philadelphia. She’s written for The Awl, The Outline, Medium, and others. 

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Factchecker: Ethan Chiel

Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

It was an early church Sunday; the sun had just risen out across the sandy desert plain. Scarlette stood at her bedroom window which still glanced a bit at the top of the dirt mountains stretched out ahead of her. Of course, her main view was that of the cement wall that caged them all in like animals. “Scarlette, you must be getting ready now.” This voice came from that of one of Isaiah’s other wives, Vanessa. Vanessa was around 25 and she had yet to find someone to marry, so Isaiah agreed to marry her in the pretense that if she lived her life without a spouse she would certainly end up in hell. She was a homely woman, but she was kind, and she always took on a mother role within the house. “If you aren’t sitting right there in that front pew in 10 minutes, you know the consequences will be great.” She quickly shuffled out of the bedroom that Isaiah shared with Scarlette, a “luxury” that the other women weren’t afforded. Scarlette never wanted this, she didn’t want to be the woman who had to walk into God’s house with a shiner and a busted lip, she didn’t want the church to know that she was a bad wife, and she didn’t want to see the disappointed look in her father’s eyes.

She had managed to keep a spoon with some ice and held that one her face all morning, allowing a bit of the swelling to go down before she had to see anyone. Of course, it would never be talked about, how a man chose to discipline his own property was his own prerogative. It was however he saw fit, and even if it wasn’t, Isaiah was above any kind of law. As she reached up to her face her fingers gently pressed against the bruise around her eye, wincing a bit as she let out a heavy sigh. She could still remember the thud it made when his fist collided with her cheekbone, she swore had he swung any harder he would have cracked the bone. She now began to dress herself, pulling on any of the clothes that would cover the marks along her body, especially the fingerprints on her neck, arms and thighs. The church would think differently of their leader if they had known what a sexual deviant he was, and if they could see the skin on her behind, they would nearly cringe.

She had finally made it to the chapel, of course she was about a minute late, only walking on as the very first cord rang out through the room from the organ. She tried to keep her head down, shuffling to her seat only peeking up to see Isaiah, and she knew the look in his eyes and he wasn’t pleased with her. She could feel a heavy knot in her stomach, knowing that as soon as they got home and he shut the door that she would be left at his mercy. She’d remembered ways he’d punished her before, tying her down to the cold wooden floor, beating her raw with a belt before forcing himself on her. This man had caused so much paint to the young girl and claimed it in the name of God, she now felt hollow on the inside. Every time he beat her she seemed to go to a different world, it must have been boring for him to fuck a lifeless corpse, but he didn’t seem to mind, he never seemed to mind. She listened to the lovely sound that spilled out from the organ, the song that meant that it was over and it was time to go home.

She stood up quickly, rushing out of the door and across the dirt path to their home. She ran inside and down the hall to their bedroom where she quickly slammed the door shut, attempting to use a broom handle propped up under the door to keep it shut. “Scarlette!” The deep voice billowed through the house and her hands began to shake, she should have been on time, she should have worn her shame out for everyone to see what an ungrateful wife she was. She fell to the floor and scooted her body back until it pressed against the wall, wishing she could just shrink down into nothing. She heard him now beating at the door, kicking, and her tears began to roll down her pink cheeks. She normally didn’t cry anymore, but this time, she wasn’t crying because she was afraid, she was crying because she knew that this was all her life was meant to be. When the door finally busted open she could see the fury in his eyes like never before, not only had she been late, but now she was hiding from him and to Isaiah, that just wasn’t acceptable. He reached down to grab a fistful of her long blonde hair, yanking the small girl up to her feet. “Do you think it’s okay to disrespect me like that in front of everyone? Huh!” He screamed as his opposing hand reached up to squeeze at her face enough that she felt like her jaw might pop. “You know if I didn’t love fucking you so much you’d be worthless. Worthless as a wife, and worthless to God.” He then tossed her down to the ground like she was a piece of garbage he was getting rid of. She stayed on the floor as she felt his foot collide with her ribs, then again, and again. When his foot finally came back for one last blow to the side of her head she could feel everything go black.

When she finally came back into consciousness she heard the running of the bathtub and she could feel the water surrounding her body. Her hands had been tightly tied to the faucet as she sat naked and he stood there beside her. “I’m sorry…” She said softly as she sobbed, the burning hot water causing her skin to feel as if it was on fire. Isaiah let out a soft sigh as he dropped down to his knees beside the tub, bringing up washcloth to dip it in the water before dabbing at her bloody face. “Scarlette sometimes, I just don’t know what to do with you… God is telling me that you don’t deserve his love.” He began to wash her, his fingers lingering in the places that made her distance her mind from her body. “But, I think I have found a solution, my pretty angel.” He said as he cupped her face, her head jerking away from his touch. “We’re going to wash away those sins…”

There was something sinister in his voice, and she couldn’t tell what he meant. “No… I’m sorry; I promise I will never be late again…” She said as she begged him, doing her best to try and wiggle free from the ropes that held her tied. “Scarlette, you need to show God you really love him, and that you really are sorry for your sins.” He began to untie her hands, still holding her wrists in his large grip as he began to pray. “I’m sorry Scarlette, but this is Gods will.” He said as his free hand moved up to press at her forehead, shoving her body back down into the water. She could feel it burning her, but she mostly could feel the water that she’d inhaled. She coughed, only sucking in more and more water as she struggled to break free. Was this how it was finally going to happen? A strange wave of calm rushed over her body as she let go, she stopped fighting; and slowly she could feel herself slipping off into the darkness.

Atlantic City Is Really Going Down This Time

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

Atlantic City covers the northern third of Absecon Island, a barrier island made up of an alarming amount of sand. It is a bad town to die in — there are plenty of vacant lots but no cemeteries. In many places, if you dig down more than eight feet you hit water. A couple blocks away from the beach, the Absecon Lighthouse is built on a submerged wooden foundation for exactly that reason — so long as you keep wood wet and away from oxygen, it won’t rot. “We haven’t tipped yet,” said Buddy Grover, the 91-year-old lighthouse keeper, “but it does sway in the wind sometimes.”

“The problem with barrier islands is that, sort of by definition, they move,” said Dan Heneghan. Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. He retired this past May. He’s a big, friendly guy with a mustache like a push broom and a habit of lowering his voice and pausing near the end of his sentences, as if he’s telling you a ghost story. (“Atlantic City was, in mob parlance … a wide open city. No one family … controlled it.”) We were standing at the base of the lighthouse, which he clearly adores. He’s climbed it 71 times this year. “I don’t volunteer here, I just climb the steps,” he said. “It’s a lot more interesting than spending time on a Stairmaster.” The lighthouse was designed by George Meade, a Civil War general most famous for defeating Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. It opened in 1857 but within 20 years the beach had eroded to such an extent that the water was only 75 feet away from the base. Jetties were added until the beach was built back out, but a large iron anchor sits at the old waterline, either as a reminder or a threat.

A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. My first night there I met a woman named Juliana Lykins who told me about Tucker’s Island — New Jersey’s first seaside resort, which had been slowly overtaken by the sea until it disappeared completely. This was a month before the election. The “grab ’em by the pussy” tape had just broken, it was pouring rain, the city was on the verge of defaulting on its debts, and 2,000 casino workers were about to lose their jobs. At the time — my clothes soaking wet, falling asleep in a Super 8 to the sound of Scottie Nell Hughes on CNN — it was hard to understand what Lykins was saying as anything other than a metaphor for the country. I missed the larger menace and focused on the immediate. Trump was elected obviously, but Tucker’s Island wasn’t a figurative threat; it was a very straightforward story about what happens to coastal communities when the water moves in.

Last June, NOAA released a report on high-tide flooding in the United States over the course of 2017. Atlantic City and Boston were tied for second place with 22 days of flooding from high tide alone. The only metro area more affected, with 23 days of flooding, was Sabine Pass, which sits on the Gulf Coast, where Texas meets Louisiana. “Sea level rise is very spatially dependent,” said Maya Buchanan. Buchanan is the resident expert on sea level rise at Climate Central, a research center based in Princeton, New Jersey. “So even New Jersey and New York are expected to have a different amount [of flooding] because there’s a lot of different factors. Some of them are global, some are regional, and some are very, very local.” New York is built on bedrock — metamorphic rock specifically, once incredibly hard and hot; that’s why so few dinosaur fossils have been found in the city. New Jersey’s soil is considerably more porous. “Atlantic City in particular,” said Buchanan, “but even New Jersey writ large, are expected to experience more sea level rise than the global mean.”

*

The decade since the recession has been rough for everyone except the wealthiest, but here the recession was a disaster. According to the South Jersey Economic Review, more than 25,000 jobs were lost in the past decade and the city’s real GDP declined by 21.4 percent between 2006 and 2015, the largest dip of any metro area in the country. Five casinos shut down in two years, and the day after the 2016 election the city was taken over by the state in order to avoid default. Oliver Cooke, an economics professor at nearby Stockton University, has referred to the past 10 years as Atlantic City’s “lost decade.”

The shuttered casinos — windowless basements filled with slot machines — were perfect for a lab.

For the first time in a while things are looking up. Last year violent crime and property crime were down 36 percent since 2017 according to the Atlantic City Police Department, and the boardwalk was markedly busier this past summer. The only place Trump’s name still appears in the city is on an old mural in the bus station, and the shuttered Trump Taj Mahal reopened as a Hard Rock Café in June. Come hell or high water, it is always sort of 2005 in South Jersey (a lot of Simple Plan on the radio) and the Hard Rock is designed to capitalize on that. In place of the Taj Mahal’s famous chandelier is a giant guitar, and what was once a jewelry store has been reborn as a shrine to Boomers called the “Rock Vault.” A Kramer Pacer, painted in the style of acid-wash jeans, hangs on the wall. bon jovi, it says. new jersey. As far as I could tell the only holdover from the Trump Taj was a sandwich chain called White House Subs, although it’s unclear whether or not that’s a nod to the president. When I walked by, a man was standing at the counter wearing a Rob Zombie T-shirt that read, 100% corpse fucking flesh eating zombie loving god damn son of a bitch.

It’s a start, but the reality is that people don’t gamble the way they used to. According to a YouGov poll from May 2018, 47 percent of millennials find casinos “depressing,” and next door to the Hard Rock, where the former Revel has reopened as the Ocean Resort, business was much quieter. The Ocean is visually striking — an enormous mass of curved glass — but it doesn’t seem to have a real identity besides ‘playing a lot of Frank Sinatra’ and several of the pushcart operators that work on the boardwalk told me they’d placed bets on how long it will last. As I was walking past, a woman asked a couple if it was as beautiful inside as it is from the boardwalk.

“Not really,” they said.

*

A little more than three years ago, as hope for a revival began to ebb, an architecture firm called Perkins+Will proposed a plan. Within the range of plans for Atlantic City, this one was unique — it was responsible. Atlantic City is four square miles, about the size of some college campuses. The shuttered casinos — windowless basements filled with slot machines — were perfect for a lab. The idea was to take the city’s vulnerability to the sea and turn it into an asset. Atlantic City would become a global hub for climate science, casinos gradually replaced with laboratories, the convention center reinvented as a training ground for civic leaders. “We weren’t talking about abandoning Atlantic City,” said David Green, one of the primary architects behind the project. “We were talking about repurposing it and bringing in academic and research partners to kind of rehabilitate the area as a kind of research hub.” Scientists would study ecological changes, sociological changes, and the way different kinds of buildings respond to sea level rise. One of the central parts of the plan was something Green called The Line, which would be a physical reminder of the changing coast and a way to make clear to the public what was happening. “You’re testing not just the physical community, but social community elements,” said Green. It was a good idea, but maybe a couple years ahead of its time. Climate change hadn’t settled into the national consciousness yet, and in the confusion of casino closings and the 2016 election Green’s plan failed to gain traction with local politicians and eventually died off.

*

In the early 1950s, two writers for the New York Daily Mirror named Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer published a book of all-American gossip (communists! grift!) called U.S.A. Confidential. New Jersey did not fare well. “There is no such place as New Jersey,” they wrote. “It is a breeding bed, playground and refuse dump for New York and Philadelphia and a refuge for their criminals. It is a highway between the two great cities. Few who use it ever stop off or look behind its billboards. If they did, they’d see plenty of ugliness.”

There is no such place as New Jersey. Pretty harsh! But Atlantic City leaned into it, learned to monetize it. The referendum to bring in casinos, paradigmatic non-places, was passed in 1976, but their success was contingent upon maintaining a duopoly between Atlantic City and Vegas. Once gambling was legalized in New York, Connecticut, and (especially) Pennsylvania, things started to decline. “What happened was that we lost the convenience gambler,” said Heneghan, “and that was a big chunk of the market. The regulators in Pennsylvania, I think very, very wisely on their part, chose sites close to the [Delaware] river to kind of create a barrier. With apologies to Winston Churchill, there was a casino curtain drawn around New Jersey.”

The city has been struggling to develop a coherent comeback plan for years. Last June, Philly Mag ran a feature on the arrival of John Longacre — a developer and bar owner who helped gentrify South Philly and is looking to open a bar in Atlantic City. Others are looking to esports — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority is in the process of finalizing a deal to install 6,000 square feet of secure servers in the city, and souvenir shops prominently display shirts that read do you even fortnite bro? Because most of the esports audience is underage, it won’t exactly bring an economic boom, though. The New York Times threw its money on sports betting, which was legalized in New Jersey in June and could help bring in revenue during the city’s lean winter months. None of these reports mention climate change.

You gotta be up the whole night just to push the water out. Unless you got a big-ass vacuum to suck it up, you gotta do it with a broom.

Heneghan, like everyone else I spoke to, doubts that sports betting will be enough to fix the city’s economic problems. At the time we spoke, the only nearby states in which it was legal were Jersey and Delaware. But Rhode Island legalized it in October, Pennsylvania in November, and New York and Connecticut are expected to follow suit in 2019. Essentially, it’s the casino curtain all over again. “I think sports betting will generate some additional revenue,” said Heneghan,“but it’s not the panacea, no.” When I asked him what the city wants to be, he had trouble answering. We were standing at the top of the lighthouse now, overlooking the Absecon Inlet — once called Graveyard Inlet because of the frequency of shipwrecks — and the small section of the boardwalk that was destroyed in Sandy. “I remember in January of ’76 I went to a meeting with the local press corps and one of the city commissioners was the speaker,” Heneghan said. “He was an older guy who had been a member of the governor’s cabinet and had been state commissioner of banking. This was before casinos and he was kind of bemoaning how quiet things were in Atlantic City. He said when he was a kid, Atlantic City was a place to go to with somebody you shouldn’t be seen with. Do things you couldn’t do at home.” The bars, Heneghan reminded me, never close here.

*

Last spring, Climate Central published a report on the injustice inherent to Atlantic City’s floods, focusing on a single block called Arizona Avenue. The casinos are protected by large dunes and the Army Corps recently finished building a sea wall with recovery funds from Sandy. Along the back bay though, residents largely rely on aging, undersized bulkheads, and where there are vacant lots there’s often no barrier at all. Things have not improved much over the past year.

“They’re always saying ‘We’re trying to work on it, the sewer systems, blah blah blah,’ but honestly I mean, come on. How do you not make a contingency plan knowing that the bay is right there, the ocean is right here,” said Raymond Mendoza. Mendoza works as a porter and a barback at the Borgata and lives about a block and a half from the back bay. When I met him he was walking a very fat, amiable beagle named Roy. “I’m always worried. When it’s really bad I just watch the tide, ’cause once I see that,” he said, pointing to the water, “come this way, I’m taking my car and driving it right into the casino [parking garage].”

‘Nuisance flooding’ is the technical term for this, but it doesn’t feel adequate. It only takes six inches of fast moving water to topple a grown man. Two feet can sweep a car out to sea. As the water rises so will structural damage. Black mold will spread, kids and the elderly will get sick, and the already debt-ridden National Flood Insurance will edge further toward collapse. “You gotta be up the whole night just to push the water out,” said Neto Alavez. Alavez moved up here from Maryland to work for his uncle’s painting company. “Unless you got a big-ass vacuum to suck it up, you gotta do it with a broom. All they have to say is ‘just go somewhere else.’ They protect all them places over [by the boardwalk]. You know what I’m talking about, the fancy stuff.”

Everyone I met spoke of Hurricane Sandy as the high-water mark for catastrophic flooding, but Sandy — despite the damage it caused — didn’t hit Atlantic City directly, and by the time it made landfall in the Northeast it was only a Category 2 hurricane. There is a pervasive Tale of Two Cities narrative that hangs around Atlantic City — the obscene wealth that circulates within the casinos butting up against dilapidated row houses outside — but the reality is rich people don’t really live in Atlantic City, they just come for conventions. It’s a city of waitresses and bartenders, and many of the residents are elderly. Others moved here after being driven out of Philadelphia and New York by rising rents. Some of them do not have anywhere inland to which they can evacuate. A stronger hurricane, a more direct hit, and people will lose everything.

“A lot of people see sea level rise as just an inundation risk, right? Or this slow problem that’s encroaching,” said Buchanan. “But any flood is basically the summation of sea level and tides and storm surge. Anything that’s adding to that platform just makes a flood that much more likely and it can really increase the frequency and severity of floods.” Last year, scientists at Rice University and Texas A&M released a paper on fossilized coral reefs that showed sea level rise did not happen gradually at the end of the last ice age, but rather in fits and spurts with brief periods of stasis.

Things could get bad here very fast, and all of the revival plans are short-term fixes. We’ve already locked in a certain amount of sea level rise at this point, so for Atlantic City it’s a question of when, not if. According to Climate Central’s risk map, even if we cut carbon emissions to zero yesterday the city would still flood by 2100. It’s likely to happen much sooner, but in that scenario at least, the Borgata is one of the last places above the waterline. Mendoza has been parking his car in the right place.

*

The news was bad this past year. In April, a lawyer named David Buckel lit himself on fire in Prospect Park to protest the world’s continuing use of fossil fuels. In early October, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report warning that we only have until 2040 to drastically alter the world’s economy in order to prevent an effectively uninhabitable planet. In late October, the World Wildlife Foundation released a report estimating that humanity had managed to destroy 60 percent of wildlife since 1970. In November, the deadliest wildfires in a century swept across California. This January, Science released a report that showed oceans were warming 40 percent faster than previously believed. In Atlantic City, a man by the name of David Dichter began petitioning lawmakers to take action. Dichter grew up in Atlantic City and served overseas as a Marine Corps officer and a foreign service officer before retiring. “I think I came back,” he said, “with a pretty good understanding of how screwed up the environment really was.”

Sea level rise did not happen gradually at the end of the last ice age, but rather in fits and spurts with brief periods of stasis … Things could get bad here very fast.

Dichter’s plan was more modest than David Green’s, but the foundational idea was the same: Atlantic City is really going down this time, the question is whether it can figure out a way to make the transition less painful. Dichter focused on tourism — if Atlantic City could position itself as the place for climate conferences, maybe that would lead to bigger things. At the very least it was a way to bring in revenue.

A resolution to turn Atlantic City into a hub for climate science and conventions was passed through the Atlantic City Council, the county freeholders association, and the state legislature, but it’s unclear how committed lawmakers are to specifics just yet. The city was still under state control and about $450 million in debt as of June 2018. The first climate conference took place the weekend of January 25th at the Claridge Hotel, and Dichter has been speaking with David Green about the way things might progress, but it’s been slow going so far. Atlantic City is, for lack of a better term, behaving like Atlantic City. In December, the mayor, Frank Gilliam, was arrested after getting into a fight outside of a casino. (Asked by a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer if he was still mayor, Gilliam replied, “Today.”) A few weeks later he was being investigated by the FBI.

What seems to be lacking at this point is grassroots community involvement. “[The city] should invite the people that organized themselves in Staten Island [after Hurricane Sandy] for the buyout,” said Klaus Jacob. Jacob is a geophysicist and Columbia University’s disaster risk and climate expert. He became somewhat famous for essentially predicting the effects of Hurricane Sandy on New York’s transit system a year before it hit. “It came from the community, it didn’t come from the government. Invite one of those main macho people that organized that neighborhood for a buyout and get a little primer from them. I’m a geophysicist, so what am I talking about here? Not my field of expertise. I just have seen it happening over the last ten, twenty years — where things are moving and where they don’t move … Wherever you look, unless there is a buy-in from neighborhood families — forget it.”

*

Climate change can’t be solved, or really even mitigated, by tourism, and there’s no shortage of people who stand to profit from future disasters. But South Jersey is much poorer than the rest of the state and as the water rises and fire spreads across the West, Dichter and Green’s respective plans might be a way for Atlantic City residents to avoid being lost in the shuffle. Whether or not the city ultimately ends up donating its body to science, there is something oddly endearing about this last push for revenue. There is no such place as New Jersey, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote 70 years ago. Turns out, they weren’t all wrong! The state will be significantly smaller in a hundred years. But if this plan moves forward, Atlantic City — a place that, for all its faults, has always tried to make the best of a bad situation — may at least be able to go out in something like style.

I reported most of this story over the summer, and every time I came back to New York I had to walk through Times Square to get to my subway stop. Mel Chin’s Wake and Unmoored had just opened — an exhibition put on by No Longer Empty and the Queens Museum. Wake was a 60-foot wooden sculpture meant to mirror a sunken ship or a whale’s ribcage, and Unmoored added context. Chin had paired with Microsoft to create a VR rendering of what Manhattan might someday look like should climate change go unchecked. When you put on the VR glasses boats began to float above you, crowding the airspace until they suddenly disappeared in a rush of plankton. It was a little too obvious and the boats looked like something out of Minecraft, but it was effective in spite of itself. The water is already above our heads, we just can’t see it yet.

* * *

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer and a bookseller based in Philadelphia. She’s written for The Awl, The Outline, Medium, and others. 

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Factchecker: Ethan Chiel

Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

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