In early March, 2041, after hearing the woes of Princeton refugees,
how Nassau Street’s pavement melted in the sun,
how tar flowed through streets and houses burned,
how lungs filled with acid bile, and housecats and ducks choked and died
near the Millstone River beach off Route 27,
we loaded what little we could carry to board a refugee train
at the New Brunswick Station.
(As usual, the escalators were broken.)
We rode north to Toronto, where we hoped to reside for five years, or even ten.
Everyone was friendly, and quickly found us an abandoned apartment
where we could live. The actress who had lived there had been slain
in the revolution ten years before when people mistook her for the corporate queen of
fossil fuel she played in a sitcom on Musk-Media Channel 4,
and so she died.
When we moved into the apartment, Lincoln and Lyuda helped us dust and clean.
Lincoln was a kindly refugee from Norfolk’s long-melted ghetto, Lyuda had fled
L’viv in ’27, when the second invasion came.
They smiled and laughed as we worked, and introduced us to the volunteers
at the local food outlet, and helped us locate schools
where we could teach how people in Central Jersey had organized
to keep our local workers’ council democratic and kind.
We had a ball for eleven years before the mosquitoes
reached Toronto with the dengue/COVID recombinant strain. We were lucky,
somehow immune, but after tending Lincoln, Lyuda and their kids
as they writhed and screamed for a week before they died,
we hopped a bus up here to James Bay.
It is peaceful by these shores,
and eucalyptus, lettuce and corn all grow well to feed us,
but we wonder how long this town can survive,
and ponder how the thirty-two million people left alive on Earth
can ever thrive?
Note: This document was translated from the human after our archeological team found a computer chip that had somehow not decayed. Its estimated date is sixteen million years BCA. (Before the Cockroach Awakening)
