The Storms of Miami
As night descended upon the city, a modern rooftop bar was mostly empty short of a few palms and other plant people. Plush, modern sofas and white vinyl chairs all sat unoccupied. The bartender, dressed in a simple black shirt and jeans, passed the time on his phone. Skyscrapers with sporadically-lit windows cleaved through the darkened skies. It had rained all day, and low-hanging clouds moved quickly through the city, all visible from the edge of the bar. Despite the torrential downpours and storms, Miami was still warm. It was Miami after all. The city was as vibrant as ever, full of colors and lights and music. Tropical plants lined the streets, vivid art was painted all over buildings.
It was in that bar that the spirit of the city found herself that night. Normally, she’d be out partying at clubs in her favorite shimmering gold dress and white heels. Tonight, though, she needed some peace and quiet. A bit of a break. Instead of the flashy evening style she had come to love, she wore an earthy green hoodie and loose-fitting tan slacks with basic leather sandals. Her illustrious, jet-black hair was tied back in a bun, and she moved with a slowness that reflected her unseen age.
As she walked into the bar, she paused to take in the plants that were tastefully placed throughout the lounge. Palms, large-leafed elephant ears, monsteras, and more, they all added to the tropical ambiance. She did love this place, and she was in a period of future mourning. This night would be spent in quiet reflection of what was to come. She sat down at one of the empty tables and persuaded the bartender into serving her a mild fruit tea with hints of strawberry and raspberry as opposed to the cocktails she normally favored. The table had a beautiful view of the city’s shadowed skyline.
Being a former river spirit, her desire to join the ocean was all-encompassing. It was what moved her waters forward, and lately, it was all she could do to remain on land. She forever felt the pull towards the deeper waters of the Atlantic. Her waters began in the wilds of the expansive Everglades and flowed southeast to nearly the tip of the Floridian peninsula. For millennia, she grew to know the companions that frequented her banks. Palms, panthers, and pelicans became her friends over the ages, and she developed a strong bond with the humans who partnered with the other beings around her. The pull towards the ocean was strong then, too, but not necessarily imminent.
Things began to change with the arrival of a new breed of humans, though, and now she found herself also presiding over a city. Before they yoked the temporary name of her river to the name of the newfound settlement, she watched as the new arrivals raided the peninsula. They murdered almost all of the original human inhabitants. This was another period of deep mourning for her, but those that remained in the newfound city kept on building. It was not something she would have predicted.
She watched throughout this last century as the newer humans dredged her waters up shore and erected impossibly-tall and grand structures downriver. These buildings were all beautiful in their own way, and she often marveled at their spectacle and artistry. She observed as they practically defied physics and common sense with ever-larger construction that sought to touch the sky. At first, six-story buildings seemed massive to her, passing the tallest trees she knew in her centuries along the river. But they didn’t stop at six, and they just kept growing taller. Freedom Tower was special to her, a 17-story tower whose ornamentation brought a song to her heart on the right day. A 28-story courthouse stood as the tallest building in the city for decades, and part of her felt like the humans might be done with their need to draw down the sky. She breathed a sigh of relief during this time, but they quickly resumed their quest to build higher and higher.
As all of these massive structures crawled up to the clouds, she often found herself feeling confused. How could these humans not see that their creations were doomed to fail? They built on swampland right alongside an ocean, after all. And yet, she begrudgingly appreciated the determination of these beings and the flair they often added to their buildings. Still, these city-dwellers never consulted with her. She would have told them about her desire to join the deeper waters just off the coast, warned them of their architects’ futility. Each staggering new tower they built along the shores broke her heart even more as she knew what their eventual fate would be.
Instead of getting to know her better, many of the early settlers and their descendants invoked a burdened sky-god from a land far across the ocean. She wondered if all of these skyscrapers were just an attempt to get closer to him. His presence here irked her a bit, especially since this particular sect of his followers seemed to want no part in getting to know the wonder of the places around them; all they wanted was to ascend so high into the sky that they’d rise above the clouds themselves. They deliberately cut themselves off from the rest of the world, and they believed themselves to be so much better than the marvels of creation that they even thought they held dominion over it all.
This idea wasn’t theirs, though; it came from a version of this sky-god. She sought him out years ago and had a brief conversation with him in the dream space. It didn’t last long, as she couldn’t bear to see the weight he was carrying. Just as she held multitudes inside her as a spirit of a river and a city and partially a lake, this god seemed to combine a warrior of storms with a benevolent old man with a white beard and robe. She approached him as the river that day, all flowing blues and greens with passionate birds flying and singing around her. She hoped to remind him of the beauty that some of his followers were erasing from the world.
When she first saw him, he was perched atop a mountain, storms raging all over. Dark black clouds swirled in the skies, and he held firm to a lighting bolt that pulsed in his left hand. It kept continually surging through his hand from the sky and into the ground. He was strong and vengeful, and he was bent forward a bit as if he was holding something massive up with his back. As she walked closer, the image changed to that of an older man floating throughout the clouds. Both his beard and robe were white and flowing, and they often merged with the creamy clouds all around. Even this version looked stressed, like he was trying to stop the very skies from falling. His face was strained. The clouds were light and feathery up this high, but the storm seethed further below, and so much fury was coursing down through the lightning bolt into the storm-god’s left hand. Even she felt the pull down into the lightning, like the storm-god was trying to harness and centralize all of creation.
“It’s too strong!” she yelled at the old man as the tempest began to infect the skies so far above. Rain flew sideways, and she held her hand out to shield her face.
“We cannot stop it,” said the man as he strained, seemingly resigned to his fate.
“There has to be something we can do!” she shouted back as the two men then merged into a massive creator deity. The clouds thundered. This was too much for one being, she thought. And she wasn’t wrong; he was buckling under everything he had wrought. She felt as if he missed a certain place, and like her, was doing everything he could to find his way there.
She left him there, unsure of what to do. The vision and conversation took place years ago, but it troubled her ever since. She felt compelled to do something, but everything she saw pouring out of so many of his followers reflected a desire for power. It seemed to grow stronger by the day.
In the meantime, she tried to find grace in the humans’ creations. The new buildings built of glass especially mesmerized her. They were incredibly tall, and their shapes were so beautifully peculiar. She’d often find herself staring longingly into the glass like a mirror, and she’d watch the throngs of the city move behind her. Coincidentally, these glass buildings seemed to have arrived with storms that were stronger than ever. The taller these human seemed capable of building, the angrier the tempests had become. As they brought this storm god all around the world, they threw up towers to carve the clouds in two. Perhaps their wish of getting closer to their god was coming true.
She pondered all of this in the empty bar. Her tea had long-since cooled, and she swirled a small teaspoon in the ochre-colored water. The outside of the cup was a glossy black, and the inside was a warm white. It sat on a similarly-colored saucer. It was another small thing of beauty she found herself appreciating from these strange humans. Maybe this would be more of a symbiotic partnership, she thought. After all, she so strongly desired to join the sea even if it drowned the streets of the city she had come to love. These humans seemed to exist in a state of confusion, too. They loved the city just as much as her, but they continued to invoke this god of storms and tempests as their technology simultaneously ravaged the world.
She felt the futility of it all and began to weep into her palms. Her shoulders heaved, and tears ran down her hands. She mourned for what she and these humans were about to lose together. The emotions consumed her, and she conjured a storm of her own. Her tears rained down from the heavy clouds, and her rage and fury coaxed the winds into gales all around the city. The storms held fast just off the coast, and they churned for days. Floods broke out all over the city that bore her name.
By naming their city after the nearby river, the humans unknowingly created a powerful spell. They invoked her desire to join the Atlantic and combined it with the might of a god of storms. All of this fused together to bring a torrent from the skies that night. She didn’t want to join the oceans like this, though. She always hoped it would be a long, leisurely descent into the waters, to give the animals and the plants and the creatures she loved time enough to head inland or up north. A gradual erosion of things. But her desire for the ocean became all-consuming. As the storm she brought raged, she again witnessed the fury of the storm god and surrendered to the sea.