30/08/2026
He hears the commotion before he understands it — an old man in his sixties, though the mud slinging past his face makes it hard to say for certain even that. By the time the words resolve into meaning, the water has already found his ankles, cold and insistent, working into the cracks of his sandals. The same young man from the corner barrels past him now, still screaming the same urgent syllable over and over, not slowing to see whether the old man follows. He mutters something back — a curse, a prayer, it's hard to tell which anymore, they've started to sound the same — and looks down at his own feet as if consulting them for an answer. They want to move, he can feel that much, some old animal instinct still firing beneath the fatigue, but the sludge has other plans, thick and grasping around his shins, each step costing more than the last while his lungs remind him exactly how many decades have passed since running came easily. The air itself has turned to weather, fine droplets flung sideways off the surging water, hanging and drifting the way rain does after a week of it, except no rain fell today — and he understands, with the calm horror of a man too tired to panic properly, that the sky had nothing to do with any of this. The water he now stands in is the same water the officer stamped passports beside, the same river the porters joked past, arrived at last to collect what it had been patiently rehearsing all morning.
The tide does not so much recede as exhaust itself, dragging what it can no longer carry down a path already flattened into unrecognizable geometry — walls reduced to their foundations, roofs resting where courtyards used to be. A passport turns lazily in an eddy near what was once a doorway, its pages swollen and curling, its photograph staring up at a sky it can no longer be matched to a face beneath — the bearer lost somewhere in the churn, or buried under debris the water has already begun reclaiming as riverbed. Overhead, rescue helicopte
