I

Clarissa did as she was told. Her mom had ordered her not to move. Not to let the bird move either. Clarissa didn’t think it was possible to do both things at once. What if the bird panicked? What if it started flying into the walls and cabinets, searching for a fresh portal to the outside world? How was she supposed to stop it then? Clarissa’s only idea had been to stand like she was now: arms out, knees bent, ready to catch the bird or swat it down if it did take flight.

“Clarissa!”

The bird, though, remained calm. It was as if an invisible cage had sprung up around it after it crashed through the kitchen window. It hopped mechanically from foot to foot, wings puttering like a toy engine. But it barely moved more than a centimetre from its landing spot on the island.

Clarissa brought her arms down and moved closer to the island, careful to avoid the broken glass on the floor. The bird was small. A sparrow, maybe. That’s what she’d heard her parents call other small brown birds. But she was only guessing. The only birds Clarissa could clearly recognize were the cardinals that sometimes stopped to rest on the electrical wires outside her house.

She extended her arm over the edge of the island. No shock of electricity came. No feeling of cold metal wire. When her fingers grazed the bird’s wings, she drew back. But the bird didn’t flinch.

“Clarissa! Is it still there?”

Her mom ran back into the room holding a large blanket in both hands. “Keep watching it,” she said, holding the blanket up a few feet in front of her.

“Mom, I don’t think . . .”

“Shh, Clarissa. You’ll freak it out.”

Clarissa’s mom inched forward. The bird stopped hopping. It lowered its tail and lifted its head straight up in the air. It looked to Clarissa like the picture of the Buddha she had seen at school. Her teacher, Ms. Thompson, had explained that people once believed in a person called the Buddha who stopped suffering completely after reaching something called enlightenment. One second, this person was sitting, legs crossed, under a tree, the next—

Clarissa looked up. Her mom was beside the island. The bird still hadn’t moved. The blanket parachuted down. A few steps would’ve been enough for the bird to escape. But instead, it remained motionless, resigned to its fate.

“OK, now be careful,” Clarissa’s mom said.

Clarissa stayed where she was. Her mom lunged forward and scooped the bird up in the blanket.

“Get the door, get the door!”

Clarissa ran to the front before she could be told to hurry up. Her mom came running after her. She placed the bird outside, lifted the blanket, shook it out, and ran back into the house, slamming the door behind her. She clutched the blanket to her chest, standing with her back against the entrance, like she was trying to stop someone from breaking in.

Outside, the bird took two steps on the lawn. It turned to face the house. Its eyes, cavernous and black, looked right at Clarissa through the window. For a second, the landscape trembled. The window disappeared, and the house, lawn, trees, and roads vanished, leaving only Clarissa, the bird, and an empty earth that stretched straight to the horizon. Clarissa blinked hard. When her vision came back into focus, the bird had flown into the neighbour’s maple tree. Right after that, it was gone.

Clarissa’s mom was panting. “Is the bird OK?” she asked.

Clarissa nodded. Her mom started nodding too. “That was crazy,” she said as she stepped forward from the door and folded the blanket. Clarissa wanted to agree but her voice had left her.

Her mom stopped nodding and began shaking her head. “I can’t believe that happened.” And then, quickly as ever, she returned to normal. “You’re going to be late for school.”

Clarissa grabbed her bag reluctantly and stepped outside. The heat was unusual. The sun was even faintly visible in the sky. It was a new sensation: the back of her neck so warm with sweat. For a moment, Clarissa became desperate to go back in the house. But she couldn’t think of what she would say to her mom. So she pressed forward instead, counting the steps toward school.

By dinner, Clarissa’s dad had put up a piece of plywood to cover the hole in the kitchen window. The floor was covered in bent nails. At some point he had decided the job was good enough, Clarissa thought, or the best that he could do.

Clarissa sat next to her brother at the table. He had his leg halfway off the chair already, eager to escape. When their mom served the reheated shepherd’s pie, he dove in face first.

“Dan,” Clarissa’s mom pleaded, “at least breathe between bites.”

Dan looked up, annoyed. He silently finished what was in his mouth and pressed his fork down on his potatoes. Everyone else went back to their plates.

“I saw a cool thing at school today,” Clarissa said.

“Oh yeah?” her dad answered. He didn’t ask for more details. His eyes stayed on his food. Clarissa could see his legs fidgeting under the table.

“Yeah, something from the Trove,” Clarissa said. “Did they ever teach you two about that?”

Clarissa’s dad shoved a forkful of meat and potatoes into his mouth before answering. “You mean all that stuff they found in that underground hatch?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re teaching you about that?” Clarissa’s dad asked. He turned to Clarissa’s mom and rolled his eyes.

Clarissa looked over for support as well, but her mom glanced away from them both. “What did the teacher show you, Clarissa?” she asked while reaching for the salad.

“Just pictures of what’s in there,” Clarissa said. “The highlights, I guess. Today it was a statue. This huge headless guy on a horse. He’s charging forward or maybe flying. Ms. Thompson said it might be a god.”

Clarissa’s dad scraped his knife and fork loudly across the plate as he picked up the last bits of pie.

“It’s pretty wild,” Clarissa said. “That this is all we have from before. Ms. Thompson was saying we can’t really know what these objects mean or what people thought about them. That’s why people study them so closely.”

“It’s just junk, Clarissa,” her dad said. “Random junk that some people decided to keep in the basement. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I think what your dad means,” Clarissa’s mom said, firmly, “is that maybe, since we lost so much in the past, we should feel lucky for what we have. Maybe that’s the lesson here.”

Clarissa started to say something, but her mom cut her off by sliding her chair back. She grabbed the empty plates from the table and hummed while carrying them to the kitchen. Clarissa quietly finished her dinner. Her brother had snuck upstairs. Her dad was flicking through his phone, his glasses hanging off the tip of his nose. Clarissa went to ask another question, then thought twice. Outside, the light in the sky was beginning to dim. It was almost time for bed.

Later that night, Clarissa looked up the Trove on her phone. Through the wall, she could hear her brother rapidly clicking his keyboard and mouse. They were both supposed to be sleeping.

Clarissa had been worried the parental controls would stop her from opening the website. But the page, plain and filled with text, loaded quickly. For the erudition of all humankind, and to preserve the memory of the little we know of what came before, this trove of documents is provided in full, and free of charge.

Scrolling down, Clarissa scanned the list of links. Close to the top was “Ancient Buddha.” There were also pictures of books, cutlery, and statues. The more Clarissa saw, the less special the site seemed. Maybe her dad was right, she thought. Caring about this stuff was pointless.

One link further down grabbed her attention, though. “Diary of an 11-Year-Old Girl.” Clarissa clicked on it. The first entry was dated August 16. Clarissa checked her phone. August 16. Funny, she thought, as she started to read.

Clarissa looked to the wall. A torrent of violent keyboard clicks came from her brother’s room.

“Dan!” her mom yelled from downstairs. “Bed!”

The clicks died down. Clarissa locked her phone and tried to fall asleep, but she couldn’t even close her eyes.

II

Clarissa tore a fresh piece of paper from her notebook. The rip was loud, but Ms. Thompson didn’t look back. She kept scribbling the math problem on the white board.

I found this weird thing, Clarissa wrote before crossing out the words and getting yet another piece of paper. She could see Janet was ready to receive the note once she finished.

For two days, Clarissa had kept quiet about the diary. She told herself that the whole thing had probably been a dream. But then she had looked for the diary again the night before, and it was all still there. The same words written in the same blocky handwriting.

That morning, she’d come to school ready to talk. But in the yard, with Ambrosia and Janet, her throat had gone completely dry. A note might be easier, she’d thought. She wanted to tell Ambrosia and Janet about the bird too. She’d become convinced that the bird and the diary were related.

Now, though, she wasn’t so sure. Trying to write it down made the whole thing seem crazy.

The bell rang for recess, and Clarissa followed Ambrosia and Janet out to their corner of the yard. They huddled in the shade of the apartment building next to the school. It was the third straight day of record heat.

“Where’s Lisa?” Janet asked.

Ambrosia kicked at the leaves on the ground before answering. “I don’t know. She hasn’t been in class for two days.”

There was quiet for a few seconds. Clarissa had also noticed Lisa wasn’t around.

“Maybe she’s sick,” Janet said.

“Did someone text her?” Clarissa asked.

“Last night, but she didn’t answer,” Janet said. “Which is weird. She’s the one who texts the most out of all of us.”

The group grew silent again.

“Maybe we should go by her house later,” Janet finally suggested.

“No, you idiot,” Ambrosia said quickly. “We all have to go straight home after school, remember?”

“Don’t call me an idiot!” Janet shot back. “She’s our friend, we have to check up on her.”

Clarissa knelt down to pick up a dead leaf. Thousands had piled up overnight at the edge of the schoolyard. They looked crisp and firm until Clarissa touched their edges and they crumbled into ash.

“What do you think happened to the tree?” she asked. She had never seen a tree without leaves before. She tried in vain to trace the path of its branches with her eyes. There was something sinister about them in their bare form.

“Who cares?” said Ambrosia as the bell rang. “These short breaks suck.”

Clarissa stayed kneeling. She decided she wouldn’t mention the diary. Or the bird. She had been right to keep them to herself.

At home, Clarissa watched her mom chop carrots for a stew. The knife clapped against the cutting board. Other than that, there was complete silence. Somehow that made it harder for Clarissa to find the right moment to speak.

“Did you know,” she finally said, “that kids used to have two months off school for something called summer?”

“Oh yeah, when was that?” her mom asked without looking up.

“You know, before.”

Clarissa’s mom stopped chopping. She seemed to wait a moment for Clarissa to suck the words back into her mouth. “Is this your teacher again?”

“No,” Clarissa said. “She stopped showing us stuff. But I found more online. You can see all of it there.”

Clarissa’s mom held the knife up but didn’t start chopping again. Clarissa wondered whether to keep going. “You’ve never looked?” she asked.

“No,” her mom said and went back to work. The silence returned. Clarissa grabbed a piece of carrot and popped it into her mouth. She savoured the crack it made when she bit into it.

Her mom looked up and visibly held back a sigh. “What did you find?” she asked.

“A bunch of stuff,” Clarissa said. She had come into the room wanting to tell her mom everything, but now she knew that was out of the question. “Like, there’s a diary of a girl who writes about not being in school and coming home from this thing called camp. I looked it up after, and it’s true. Kids didn’t go to school for two months. Every year. Isn’t that wild? What do you think they did? It’d be so awesome.”

“Wouldn’t you get bored?” Clarissa’s mom asked. “And what about all your friends?”

“They wouldn’t have school either! That’s the great part!”

“I guess.”

Clarissa swallowed. “It was also hot in those months—during this summer thing. Maybe that’s why they didn’t go to school. Because it was too hot.”

Her mom stood still for a few seconds. Clarissa thought about the bird. She looked up at the window with the piece of plywood. Her mom went back to chopping, starting on the celery now.

“Do you think that’s what’s happening now?” Clarissa asked. “That we’re getting summers back?”

“I don’t know, Clare,” her mom said. She never called her Clare. “I don’t know what’s happening now.”

III

Clarissa finished her dinner as fast as possible and went straight to her room. She unlocked her phone and opened the article she’d found earlier: “10 Things You Need To Know About The Deluge.” She looked nervously at her bedroom door, unsure of why this seemed so forbidden but ready to throw her phone off the bed if her parents knocked on the door.

The latest rain event had been scheduled for the night before, but something had gone wrong. At 7:30, when the rain was half an hour late, Clarissa’s parents had told her and Dan to go watch TV or play on their computers. Clarissa chose TV so she could stay downstairs. She caught her dad opening the front door a few times to stick his hand outside, as if the problem might simply be that the raindrops had turned silent and invisible. She also saw her neighbours bringing in the house plants that they’d hoped to water with the free rainfall. They’d stayed outside for several minutes, just looking up at the sky. Even from a distance, Clarissa could tell they were scared.

Clarissa’s dad said that the rain system had never failed before. Not just in his life, but ever. Clarissa remembered how when she was younger, she had worried about this kind of thing. Her worst fear had been that the rain might never turn off. She’d asked her dad once how the rain events worked, thinking that the answer might reassure her. But it only made things worse. Her dad described such a complicated system that it became too easy for Clarissa to imagine it breaking down.

Clarissa had asked her mom, too, what would happen if it didn’t stop raining. “I’m sure they’ve got a plan for that,” her mom had answered, with equal parts certainty and dismissal. “And besides,” she’d added, “it won’t happen.”

Now Clarissa wondered if the people before the Deluge had thought the same way as her mom. Maybe they hadn’t prepared for the worst because they didn’t believe that the worst would happen. In the diary, Clarissa had read the phrase “got caught in the rain” and looked it up after. She couldn’t imagine living like that, with random weather all the time. But maybe if life was that chaotic, people just got used to it and didn’t bother thinking about the future.

Clarissa opened another tab and searched for “preparing for absolute disaster.” She found stories about people building their own weather control systems and setting them up in the middle of nowhere. The New Architects, they called themselves. Clarissa was able to see only the headlines. Her phone blocked the actual sites. But it was enough. People were getting ready, she thought. Did that mean the rest of the world wasn’t ready? This time, Clarissa didn’t want to ask her parents what they thought.

Clarissa texted the article about the Deluge to Ambrosia. She still hadn’t mentioned the bird or the diary to anyone. More than ever, though, she was convinced something or someone was speaking to her. That they were trying to warn her.

A minute later, her phone buzzed. WTF? Ms. T really got to you, didn’t she?

IV

Ambrosia calmly lowered her arm and passed a paper to Clarissa between their desks. Clarissa took it without looking and unfolded it after Ms. Thompson turned away.

Janet had written: I don’t know about you guys but my parents are acting really weird. They both went to the supermarket yesterday and came back with food and toilet paper for like a month! They barely hear me when I’m talking. I even got to stay up late to watch Romance Island last night.

Ambrosia had responded right below. Oh my god! I’m so jealous. Don’t say anything, though. I’m going to watch it when I get home.

Clarissa stared at the blank space below Ambrosia’s writing. Her hand trembled. Under the desk, she unlocked her phone, which she’d snuck into class that day. She pulled up the diary. It was right there in that day’s entry: Janine said her parents bought food and toilet paper for like a month!

Clarissa’s stomach churned just like it had the day before when she’d gone into her parents’ bedroom. After waiting all day for luggage to appear, she’d thought that maybe the spell had broken. But then, on her dad’s side of the bed, she’d found an open suitcase.

After that, she hadn’t been able to stop looking at the broken window in the kitchen, thinking that some poison was wafting in through the hole behind the plywood. She freaked out and told her dad that he should get off his ass and fix it. He’d sent her straight to her room without her phone. That’s why she had completely forgotten about Romance Island. Usually, she tried to convince her parents to let her watch it too.

Then, that morning, Janet had told Ambrosia and Clarissa that Lisa had finally texted. She wasn’t coming back. They had all been sitting at their desks waiting for class to start. There was no outside time at all anymore. Before school, kids went straight to their classrooms. After school, parents drove up to the front door so the children could run out as fast as possible to get into the air-conditioned cars.

“Have your parents said why you’re still coming here?” Janet had asked. “Mine said it was important to keep learning,” she continued when no one replied. “Even now.”

Ambrosia had laughed bitterly. “Well, you can tell them everything you’re learning from the nature videos Ms. T shows us these days,” she said.

Janet had quivered and looked down. Clarissa had put a hand on Janet’s back, running it in circles from the right shoulder to the top of the neck, then down the spine and up. She had stayed focused on the motion—up, down, side, and up—to keep her stomach settled while Ambrosia sat on her desk, facing the back of the room.

Now Clarissa looked outside. The trees were bare. The grass was like straw. Close to the school, a squirrel jumped from one branch to another and lost its balance. It fell on a car and immediately bounded off the searing hot roof.

The government was supposed to be launching something into the sky the next night, something that was going to bring the temperature down. Clarissa hadn’t quite understood it when she overheard her parents discussing it at home.

She started writing. I need to tell you something. Something really weird happened. Then she stopped, scribbling over the words until the pen almost broke through the paper. She began again. I can’t believe they let you watch! Don’t spoil anything. I really hope she kicks Steve out!

“We’re leaving this afternoon,” Janet said the next day. She had come in to get a few things from her desk, and Clarissa and Ambrosia had followed her out into the hallway.

“That’s crazy,” Ambrosia said. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know, they won’t say.”

“Are your grandparents going with you?” Clarissa asked. The words were out of her mouth before she thought about them.

Janet looked at her with confusion. “Yeah, my dad drove to get them over the weekend.” She paused. “How did you know?”

Clarissa’s knees wobbled. “I don’t know. I just had a feeling, I guess.”

No one talked for a few seconds. Then Ambrosia turned back to Janet. “So when are you coming back?”

“I don’t know,” Janet said. “That’s the strange part. It’s like we’re moving forever or something. I’m kind of freaked out.”

Ambrosia went to open her mouth, but even she didn’t know what to say. After a minute, she stepped in and gave Janet a hug. When she moved back, she coughed.

“They’re just being parents,” she said. “You’ll come back. It’d be crazy not to.”

“Yeah, probably,” Janet said.

They both looked at Clarissa.

“Clare, you OK?” Janet asked.

Clarissa realized she had been staring at the doors at the end of the hallway without blinking. She shook her head. “Yeah. I just didn’t sleep that well.”

The other two glanced down at their shoes.

“OK, I better go, my dad’s waiting in the car,” Janet said. She walked away slowly, then turned back to give one more wave. Finally, she left through the doors and fell out of sight.

Clarissa and Ambrosia stayed in the hall. Clarissa could hear the sounds of Ms. Thompson’s latest video through the door. She didn’t want to look at Ambrosia. She was scared to see her scared. She went to speak but Ambrosia got there first.

“I don’t think she’s coming back.”

The next night, Clarissa went downstairs to get water. She could hear her parents whispering. They stopped once she stepped into the kitchen. Clarissa’s mom looked around, searching for something to focus on. Clarissa grabbed a glass. No one said hello or asked if she needed anything.

“Is everything OK?” Clarissa asked. She hadn’t slept the night before. She had sat by the window until the sun came up, texting Janet with no response and waiting for whatever it was that was supposed to save them.

Now her mom looked at her dad, who shrugged. This was it, Clarissa decided. There was nothing anyone could do.

“Yes, honey, everything is fine,” her mom said finally. She was still shaking her head at Clarissa’s dad. “Just go to sleep.”

V

Tomas Hachard

Tomas Hachard is the author of City in Flames. He was one of CBC Books’ writers to watch in 2023.

Julia GR

Julia GR is an illustrator and designer based in Montreal. Her work has been featured in magazines, books, and fashion, among other places.