A Long Summer Short
The summer Pia was fourteen was the strangest summer she had ever had.
The town was, technically, dying. There was no other word for it. The relocation moves began in late June. Trucks came every day. Families packed their lives into boxes and were driven inland. The empty houses were boarded up. The boards were stamped with a small official mark — *Coastal Relocation, do not break and enter, do not occupy* — and were left.
By August, Avila Road had four houses still occupied. Pia's family. Pia's grandmother. Marek's family, who were not leaving until early September. And, at the far end, an old couple Pia had only ever known as the Halpens, who, like her grandmother, had refused both options.
The other twelve houses on the road were boarded up.
The town had become — in a way Pia could not have described before this summer — *quiet*. The shops were closing one by one. The bus that ran into town came twice a day, instead of seven times. The library, after a hundred and twenty years on the High Street, had moved its remaining stock inland in mid-July. The town's small newspaper had printed its last issue in August. The headline had been *thank you for reading us*.
Pia, every evening, walked.
She walked the lanes she had known her whole life. She made a careful list, in a small notebook, of everything she wanted to remember. The way the bakery had smelled in the mornings.