I remember the cars strewn around Bana after the roads melted, until a storm lifted them and cast them in the sea. They stopped giving hurricanes human names the year of the Cat Fives – that storm was Theta 24. We became trapped in cycles of flood and drought. The pandemic of 2020 had already shut down country borders, but the viruses had found their animal hosts and they sickened us in waves. The animals we let loose to roam and graze the almost barren land mostly starved and died, then shrivelled into ash. A few horses and mules survived and did not become feral. The pigs and dogs that survived banded together in feral packs and began to hunt and feed on us. We tried poison and traps, but they bred too fast.

Then it became too hot to go outside in the day; the dust storms started and the sun began to blind and kill. Our neighbour, Neema, was the first I knew to die – a quiet soft-spoken woman made cantankerous by thirst and hunger. She tried to scratch out her husband’s eyes and he threw her out. All we heard was the bang of the front door and then her screams. No one opened their doors to her. I did not ask my parents why.

I still think of my father and the way he died. He was out all night at the seawall foraging for food. Daylight caught him there. He tried to get into one of the dawn bunkers, which still existed then. The people inside would not open the door. They shouted to him that there was no more room. I never saw his body and I don’t know how the Domins, who brought the news, knew who he was, because there was nothing left. All they gave my mother was his wedding ring. For a long time, I thought about his bones. I didn’t believe the sun could destroy bones, at least not so quickly, and I imagined the gold ring, loose around a finger bone, against the blackened dust. I also thought about the food he might have found, which we did not get. I wondered who would have taken the food and left his ring.

I didn’t witness what the sun could do to people until after Sorrel was born. I was always sorry she saw it, too.