I remember when the porch was fifty yards from the high-water mark. I remember it clearly, like it was yesterday. Now, it’s closer, much closer, every single tide, every tide. The wood is turning soft under my feet, that deep-down rot that smells like old earth and wet salt. It’s a slow thing, a very slow thing. You don't notice the inch it takes in July, but by November, you're looking at the spot where the rosebushes used to be and all you see is gray foam and broken shells. It’s like the house is being digested by something much bigger than itself. The salt spray has a way of getting into everything. It gets into the hinges, it gets into the engine block of the old boat, it gets into your very lungs. My chest feels heavy some nights, like I’ve swallowed a gallon of seawater, a literal weight. The girls at the clinic talk about *psychosomatic* reactions to stress, but I know it's just the house breathing in what the world is giving out. Every morning, I wake up and I check the line I carved into the dock piling ten years ago. It’s gone. Completely covered up. The water doesn't go back down to where it belongs anymore, it just lingers, like it's waiting for me to turn my back so it can take another step. My father built the smokehouse with his own hands, those big, calloused hands that never stopped moving. He didn't plan for the world to melt. He planned for a hundred years of silver scales and woodsmoke and a roof that stayed dry. Now the smokehouse floor is slick with green slime even when the sun is out, always slick. It’s a *regression*, seeing the land turn back into the sea floor. We spent our whole lives pulling things out of that water just to pay the electric bill, and now the water wants the bill paid in full. It wants everything back. Every single thing. They come by in those bright yellow vests sometimes, those people from the city, and they talk about *demographics* and *relocation strategies*. They look at us like we’re already ghosts, already drowned. One of them, a young man with a clipboard and clean fingernails, he looked at my kitchen floor and I saw him flinch. He didn't say it out loud, but I knew he was thinking about the *structural integrity* of the beams. He kept using words like *unsustainable*. It’s a hard word, a very hard word. It means you don't belong where you were born anymore. It means your memories don't have a foundation to sit on. I’ve got forty-two dollars in my checking account right now, forty-two dollars. That’s the reality of it. You can’t just pack up a life and move it to higher ground when your life is tied to a keel and a net. The boat is old, older than some of the houses in the village, and she draws too much water to move her anywhere else. If I leave, I leave her to sink in the mud. I’d be leaving *that thing* behind, the only thing that ever gave me a paycheck. Every day I think about it, every single day. Where do you go when you're seventy-six and the only thing you know how to do is read the ripples on a bay that's trying to swallow you whole? Last Tuesday, the tide didn't go back out all the way. It stayed in the garden, sitting there among the dead tomato vines like a gray mirror. I stood there in my boots—the ones with the hole in the left toe—and I watched a crab crawl over a brick that used to be part of the chimney of the old shed. It was a *dissociative* moment, I think. I didn't feel like I was standing in my own yard. I felt like I was standing on the bottom of the Atlantic, just waiting for the pressure to finally crush my ribs. I could see the future and it was just bubbles and silence. Someone told me I should be angry. Someone said we should sue the state or the companies or the sky. But who do you sue for the moon pulling the water too hard? It’s just the way it is now. My neighbor, he’s eighty now, and he just stopped cleaning the salt off his windows. He said, 'What’s the point?' and I couldn't give him an answer. I couldn't say a word. We just sat there on his porch watching the ripples come up the driveway, those little silver tongues licking at the gravel, tasting the land before they take it. I haven't told my daughter how bad it is. When she calls from her apartment three hours inland, she asks about the weather, and I tell her it’s fine, it’s just fine. I don't tell her that the cellar is a tide pool now. I don't tell her that I can hear the foundations groaning at night, that *auditory hallucination* of the house screaming because its feet are wet and cold. I’m lying to her every time we speak, every single time. I’m just waiting for the day the phone line goes under. I want her to remember this place as it was, dry and solid, not as the wreck it’s becoming. Tonight the moon is huge, just HUGE, and the water is making that sound against the floorboards. It’s a soft sound, almost like a lullaby if you don't know any better. I’m sitting here with a glass of water that tastes like iron and I’m wondering how much longer the wood can hold against the salt. It’s a *terminal* situation, that’s the word the man with the clipboard used when he thought I wasn't listening. The village is holding its breath. I’m holding my breath. We’re all just waiting to see who lets go first... the land or us... and I think I already know the answer.