Photo by Anna Bratiychuk on Unsplash
The ice cold stone step bites into my butt as I sit in front of the brownstone debating my waking existence with my morning coffee, watching a watery January sun struggle against ten million hangovers to start the new year. Last night, confetti fell like ashes and champagne flowed like tears. Today, glitter leaps into gutters from abandoned dried-out pine trees outside of the few houses pretending to still have families.
Behind me, a door opens and closes. “Happy 2052. Okay for me to join you?” Whitney asks as she creaks herself down beside me. Hair of dog with a hint of vanilla whiffs on the breeze from her coffee mug.
“Sure.” I say to the other female member of our polycube. “Happy New Year.” I add belatedly after a sip from my rapidly cooling coffee. Climate change didn’t erase seasons; it only made the variation within the season as predictable as my hot flashes. For Christmas, it had been record-breaking heat, next week will be record-breaking cold. Tomorrow will be normal temperatures but with a side of the white snow we wanted last week followed by a night sleet to petrify it in place. January this far north isn’t forgiving and, thanks to climate change, neither is summer.
“You told me to tell you to climb out of your mope.”
“After the New Year started.” I sigh. “I guess that is now.”
“Your daughter is twenty-six. They don’t come home anymore at that age.” She chuckles. “Lord knows, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, but the rules have changed.” She let me pause for a sip without interrupting, but I feel the judgy beside me, so I adjust the verb tense. “Are changing.”
“And yet some things will never change. Twenty-somethings know everything.”
“For as long as there continues to be twenty-somethings. And that is what now? Another ten years?”
“Twelve. The last child was born in November 2033.”
“Fuck microplastics and forever chemicals.”
“Fuck them sideways.”
(words 323; first published 1/4/2026)