Sea-level rise talk: Toporagno and the flood
This short story is the first in a collection of three inspired by my master's thesis research on sea level rise narrative futures in the Venice Lagoon: talk, trust, time. Toporagno went out one day to collect grasses from the high mound of the tidal flat. He plodded up the shallow mucky slope and skirted a pack of friar birds to reach the top where the grasses had remained dry even in the recent stormy days. From this point he could see all the places he had ever known. Across the small channel there was the neighboring salt-flat where his den-brothers lived, and beyond that lay one where the Piovanelli ducks make their nests hidden from the terrifying raptors, and in the far distance he couldn't quite discern some shoreline that he knew was there because of the gulls who come to give news from across the northern lagoon. To his other side was the humble human city, a busy thing that barely concerned the shrews and their neighbors. Only once in a while would a small rowboat pu...