Afterlife

Rhea Lopez

Alarm. Hour 2400 of the Deluge. 

At the 2,400th hour of The Deluge, here’s what I knew about my neighbour, Flory– She sings to her plants. She’s in mourning over a beehive. She soaks her feet in her flooded front lawn every day. Also, she might just be a witch. 

I didn’t believe in witches, and was disinclined to believe the rumours that hung around Flory’s house like smoke, trailing from the neighbours’ open windows and loose tongues. Years earlier, they had welcomed me to the building with warnings and snide remarks about her– the strange reclusive old lady that talked to her plants, and no one else. She had lived here longer than any of us, but in the collective memory of the neighbourhood she had never had a family– it had always been just her, shuffling past her windows, or wandering through the chaotic wilderness of her front garden. 

From the window of my first-floor apartment, the uneven canopy of green hid a dense mat of undergrowth. A large irregular mass, a bustling beehive, hung from the branch of an unruly mango tree, below a serpentine orchid. The beehive had grown over the years, weighing down the branch and eventually expanding onto the rafters that held up the red-tiled roof. At the onset of summer, the garden air would come alive with the fragrance of a hundred little flowers mingling with the happy murmuring of bees. Flory was at her most colourful in the summer too. She would explore her garden, humming along with the bees, the hem of her flowery dress damp from the dewy grass. When the monsoon came around, the bees would retreat to the safety of the hive, and the mango tree would be covered in patchy white lichen. The grassy, weedy floor at the base of the tree, now speckled with mushrooms, sang with the trilling, croaking chorus of wet, happy frogs, and the canopy overhead sparkled with a few hundred fireflies. Flory was wilder in the monsoon, her singing got louder and more raspy, and she seemed content to let the monsoon showers drench her as she wandered through her garden. The garden, now nearly a forest, morphed and moved with the changing months– changing colour and song with the seasons; and with it, Flory seemed to change too.

Since I had moved into the apartment overlooking Flory’s home, I had noticed the land adjoining the little forest was also changing– drastically and rapidly– growing greyer with unending concrete and settled smog. 

As the cement structures, hot tarred roads, and lines of parked cars edged closer to Flory’s home, she became more reclusive, almost reluctant to venture out of the small green haven she nurtured. Flory stopped leaving her front gate, even before The Deluge, even before the endless rain of The Downpour. Back then, when the sun still used to rise, she would wake up with the first light and stand by her front gate. I would hear her singing with the earliest bird, in her raspy, whispering way till the poder’s horn disrupted their dawn duet to announce the arrival of bread. Flory bought two loaves every morning, and walked back to her front porch picking crumbs off of one, and scattering them along the path. She sat on her porch, her feet propped on the top-most of three deep red steps, watching the tiny speckled munias gather along the pathway, dotting it in pale pink as they ate crumbs. 

Flory’s daily ritual in her garden had become part of my morning routine soon after I moved in opposite. I had come here hoping to escape the city I grew up in, and reconnect with my ancestral land. Back then, I had hope– before The Downpour and before The Deluge, but even that was slowly being eaten away at by luxury housing complexes and expensive cafes. 

When I looked out of my window in the morning, Flory’s garden felt like a little green beacon of hope in a desolate urban sprawl.

*

Alarm. Hour 3500. 

By Hour 3500 of The Deluge, the murky water had reached the topmost step of Flory’s porch. It seemed a strange signifier of time having passed, in a grey world of incessant rain. The local authorities had set up a blaring alarm that announced what hour of the Downpour, and now the Deluge, we were in— an odd exercise in timekeeping, fruitless in the face of the ceaseless monsoon.

The Downpour had signalled the end of Flory’s morning ritual, the endless rain disintegrating the breadcrumbs left out for birds that no longer seemed to exist. Flory still sang in the morning. I would see her pottering about her wild little garden, lips moving– almost like she was speaking to the plants. I could hear nothing but the sound of the torrential rain. I was terrified of the weather, and the weather was constant, so I was constantly terrified.

Most days, I found myself feeling alone, and helpless, and angry– with nothing to do, nothing that could be done. I would sit for hours, days, 500 alarms (Who even knew anymore?) watching Flory’s forest from my window. 

It had thrived when the rains came, if only for a while. In the 100th hour of The Downpour (which seems an entire distressing eternity ago now), a swift, dark, buzzing cloud marked the exodus of the bees from the beehive. In the 300th hour, the branch holding the empty hive, bereft of its inhabitants, crashed through the undergrowth, taking several of the tiles from her roof with it. Flory’s songs had grown wistful, a hoarse whisper barely escaping as she craned her neck to squint through the rain at the grey sky, no longer hidden by the intricate canopy of her once thriving garden. She had worn black since the day the beehive fell, and the rumours of witchcraft had only grown louder and more venomous.

By the time The Deluge was upon us, the forest looked like a swamp. The rain, when it fell in The Downpour, was clear, but the floodwater of the Deluge was like murky blood, thick with the red soil of the land.

Flory’s forest had died, the salinity of the floodwater choking the last of her garden plants around the 600th hour of The Deluge. I wondered what would happen to Flory now, a concern not wholly unselfish – what would I do now? 

Flory proved resilient, and within weeks her home had transformed into a new kind of forest. Earthen pots, darkened with moisture and speckled with salt, lined Flory’s partly submerged porch wall, with strange waxy plants peeking out. Dark green seaweed hung from the wall, and swayed in the saline stream below. Old empty jars with rusty lids and muddy contents sat haphazardly on the windowsills, herbariums with saplings so small, I couldn’t recognize what they were. Then, in the 800th hour of the Deluge, I watched Flory gently transplant the saplings into a row of partly submerged pots in the flooded garden. Mangroves. Bonsai mangroves with small, stilted roots– when Flory glanced hopefully up at the dark clouds, I wondered if she saw me, smiling for the first time in 800 hours, at a freshly planted row of stunted trees. 

*

Alarm. Hour 3999.

Around the time the beehive had fallen, someone had spray painted the word ‘WITCHRAFT’ in gaudy neon yellow across Flory’s porch wall. I had wondered, the day it appeared, if the spelling mistake was intentional, or an accident resulting from hurried vandalism, children scared of being caught by someone they seemed to think was a witch. It bothered me either way, but not as much as the fact that Flory had never painted over it, or tried to clean it off. 

It is the 4000th hour of The Deluge, and the paint has finally begun to run. Flory is sitting on her porch, bare feet in the water, talking to the mangroves, with the word ‘WITCHRAFT’ dripping down the wall behind her.

Alarm. Pause.

“Hour 4000 of The Deluge.”

Pause. 

Alarm. 

Again?

“In the 4040th hour, the evacuation boats will be arriving in your area to take you to the Afterlife. Please carry government issued identification. Do not pack anything. Be prepared to leave by the 4040th hour. Help is on its way. Thank you.”

Help is on its way. I test the phrase in my mouth.

A sudden unease in my stomach forces me to sit down. What’s the point? What had survived The Deluge anyway? What would this new world, the AfterLife, look like? What would I do there? What if –

Fighting the spreading anxiety, I desperately turned to look at Flory, still sitting on her porch, feet in the water. She seems unaffected by the unexpected announcement. My dread turns to frustration, and prompts me to walk towards my front door. I pull on my gumboots, untouched since the early days of The Downpour, and find myself making my way through the murky water towards Flory’s house.

I push open the gate, rusted to near immobility by moisture and disuse. Something bumps against my toe, and nips it. Startled, I glance down to see a tiny fish nibbling at the edge of my foot. 

Fish… Wait. Fish?! Not since the early days of The Deluge…

“How?” I gasp aloud. 

“The plants.”

The voice above me momentarily shifts my attention away from the wondrous little creature at my foot. Flory steps off her porch and into the flooded garden. The lace hem of her black dress swirls in the water at her calves, as she wades effortlessly through the water.

“They come because of the plants. They are because of the plants,” she offers by way of explanation. 

I nod silently, unsure what to do besides watch the fish. 

“Let it feed,” she smiles, “Got all this extra skin, without much use for it anyway.”

I find myself nodding solemnly as I look back up at her face smiling back at me. I walk toward her, letting the fish trail along with me, occasionally getting a nibble at my heels. 

“I don’t know if you heard,” I say, “The rescue boats are coming to take us to The Afterlife.”

Flory chuckles softly, and I realise I like the calm amusement in her laugh – “How could I not? They blast that bloody alarm every hour, like the passage of time means anything without the setting sun, or migrating ibises, or falling leaves…”

Alarm. As if on cue. 

Her voice trails off, but I almost feel the grief in her voice settle softly in the water around us, sending ripples to the edges of the garden.  

“Maybe people would be less mean if you didn’t do things like sing to plants, and grow seaweed from your window panes.”

“Maybe people would be less mean if they sang to plants and grew seaweed from their window panes too.”

“What do you even talk to plants about?” 

“The weather.” Flory grins, and I can’t help but smile back. 

“Plants love singing, that’s why the birds did it, the bees did it, and when the cicadas emerged – they sang to the trees too. Remember how noisy the squirrels used to be?”

I feel oddly satisfied with this answer, this shared memory of the sounds of our home keeping time. I find myself wanting her to come to the AfterLife, with her strange plants and reassuring answers.

“Will you go?” 

“I suppose I will go, but only because, well, what else is there to do?”

“But you don’t see the point?” 

“Not really. I doubt there’ll be anything there, anything salvaged from this.”

“When this world started changing, when your garden died, how did you continue to care?”

“What else is there if not hope?” 

*

The Deluge has weathered everything up to our ankles – saline water has left table legs porous and the air damp and rancid. The walls are covered in waxy curtains of kelp. On a table covered in dry leaves and scattered with seeds, is a wooden box with a loosely fitted lid. It is surprisingly clean, and a pale green, and catches my attention almost instantly. 

“You asked what gives me hope?” Flory nods her head towards it.

“That’s the last of them.”

“Last of what?”

“The queens.”

I lift the lid and peer inside. A quiet humming murmurs through the soft wood of the box and through my fingertips.

A single, fat bee sits in one corner, amidst dried flowers and some sort of sticky substance. The bee has tiny, transparent wings, embroidered with silvery veins, and a pointed abdomen. A queen bee.

“She’ll bring the rest, so long as she survives The Deluge. “I came to live here after my husband died, a long long time ago. The garden was pitiful. Alien weeds were growing through the cracks in the dry earth. The air was still, and painfully silent. The mango tree had been lopped and pruned to no more than a pitiful log.” 

Flory’s voice weaves through the humming of the queen bee, the story continuing like a duet;
“I tended to the earth, the garden, and planted what I could – and I just let the mango tree be. When the branches grew out, and the tree first flowered, the bees came, following their queen. Once the bees were there, oh! How to even… everything grew wild.”

Flory turns to face the pouring rain, framed by her warped wooden doorway, and the nostalgic joy in her voice fades. 

“If the queen survives to the time when there is no more rain, I believe she will call the rest of the bees. That may be our only hope of regrowing the forests, grasslands, and our gardens.”

*

Alarm. Hour 4040

The boats are here. Everyone has boarded, their blank, dripping faces sullenly watching me beg the last boat to wait while I get Flory.

I run through her gate, only to find her standing in her doorway.

“Why aren’t you coming?”  

“I told you. This is all I have.” 

“What do we have,” I’m almost pleading, “If not hope?”

“Home. What do we have, if not home.”

I stare at her. She’s staying then. Flory looks back out at the rain thrashing the tortured earth. 

“Everything I have done, I have done to protect my home,” She looks me in the eyes.  “Go save yours."

She presses a cold locket in my palm; it is round with a small yellow flower pressed into amber resin. Realising I have to leave, I feel a sad coldness sweep over me, colder than the endless rain and the metal in my palm. 

At the gate, I turn to look at her. She is walking out into her garden, her feet sinking in the earth and the water lapping at her waist. Goodbye. I make no sound, but she turns to look at me. I think she smiles, but she seems to be disappearing into the thick sheet of rain around her.

“Come on already, man!” 

The irritation in the voice behind me drags me back to reality and the awaiting boat. I clamber in, and sit down in a damp space on the floor. I glance around me at the tired faces of my co-passengers to The Afterlife. The engine whirrs, the boat jolts to life, and I take one last look behind at the endless water. I squint through the rain at Flory’s garden, craving the reassurance of her green haven one last time, before slouching down into the floor of the boat. I wonder, hopelessly, what The Afterlife will be like. My hand moves to the locket around my neck.

As the garden disappears into the grey horizon, the locket begins to vibrate gently, buzzing, humming, alive against my suddenly hopeful heart.

It is the 4040th hour of The Deluge, and here’s what I know about my neighbour, Flory. She sings to her plants. She’s in mourning over a beehive. She soaks her feet in her flooded front lawn every day. Also, she’s given me the one thing that might just save us all.

***

About the Author

Rhea Lopez is a conservation biologist & storyteller, who writes about people and the environment in a sometimes-futile attempt to deal with the anxiety of losing the wild spaces that give her hope. She's happiest near a roaring river, and loves listening to strangers' stories, the smell of pine forests, and the taste of mangrove leaves.

This story is an excerpt from Earthbound: Climate Stories from South Asia, a forthcoming anthology of twelve stories that reimagine our relationship with a changing planet through the lens of South Asian lives, landscapes, and myths. It brings together voices of resilience, loss, and hope — stories that remind us what it means to live, love, and dream in a fast-changing world. Follow Earthbound on Instagram here.