Allison Krupp’s “Swamp City!” was awarded First Place in Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Award for Fiction competition by Kelly Link, and it appears in our Winter 2025 issue. In her commendation, Link calls it “a sly and unsettling story in which people, on the periphery of an urban, ongoing geological disaster, slowly shift the complicated patterns of their lives into other shapes. The prose is lively, prickly, and fizzes with life, as do the characters, whose shared childrearing, work (or lack of it), infidelity, and small differences feel all the more urgent as the literal landscape of their life becomes more uncertain. I could read a whole novel if it proceeded from this piece—this is the kind of contemporary writing which manages to communicate the precarity of life during the Anthropocene, showing how it unfolds in the day-to-day of people who feel as real as me or you.”
Frau Schnitzler passes out fliers at preschool pick-up. “The Big Sink Is Coming. Prepare Yourselves.” It’s sloppy calligraphy in Declaration of Independence theatrics, followed by a list of instructions in French, English, German. Number one: Get to higher ground.
I crumple the paper into the bottom shelf of Remy’s stroller: rags crisp with dried spit-up and splats of granola and unused diapers. Frau Schnitzler watches me. Patchy blood-orange Peter Pan haircut; jaundice gleam. It’s rare to meet someone who cares.
“She should be fired for peddling conspiracies.” Home. Meikel peels potatoes at the kitchen counter, skin unfurling from decadent yellow bulbs. Remy in her high chair, banana and avocado beard, dark-brown ringlet curls. None of Meikel’s lemon coloring; hair like melting sherbert to his shoulders.
“I mean, Berlin is sinking. A little bit more every year.” I sit at the kitchen table and tug my damp socks from my toes, pinch the big one hard. A high-pitched shot of pain comes a second too late.
“I told you to wear my boots.” Meikel gathers the potatoes in a colander like a farm girl collecting chicken eggs. “It’s winter now.”
Meikel loves to say facts aloud: “it’s winter”; “this bakery raised their prices”; “it has been eight weeks since we last had sex.”
Remy squawks, and Meikel curls over her to sputter kisses along her neck and tickle her till she rattles with laughter. I watch them, my toes throbbing like a frog’s heartbeat, until Meikel unshackles her from her highchair and changes her in the room we painted lilac, singing a German nursery rhyme I don’t know.
It’s late, inky black and wet, orange street lamps blotchy on tram tracks like used floss. I walk south down Warschauer Strasse and cower under the still-unfinished Amazon Tower, empty offices all lit up, sutured with gaudy scaffolding. A cubism Christmas tree. Pink tubes rise and loop from the construction site, throw themselves toward the East Side Gallery and onward toward the river. “It’s groundwater,” Meikel told me once. “Berlin’s a swamp. They have to keep it in place as they build it up.” When I asked why pink, sixty kilometers of silly string across a predominantly gray city, he said: “They made a study. Children like the color most.”
I drop down the staircase by the mall and loop around the construction site. Although the pink tubes are too high to climb, my thighs scream to lope over them; my arms itch to hang. I imagine myself a tightrope walker: toe, heel as I glide along the pink piping, surge of water just beneath my sole.
There was a club around here once (we are always saying this). I remember it as torsos slick as dewy car windows; meaty tongues tangy with coke and rank with nicotine; straining; pumping; rooms black and alive and throbbing like organs. I trace the pink tubes to the entrance; a bouncer. It’s still here. My beer too empty; jeans too tight on my thighs. Tips of my fingers on the brick wall outside; vibrations through my knuckles, my wrist, my elbow. A mile away, Meikel waiting like the oven left on. I said I’d buy us both beers.
A man emerges from the club and staggers through the darkness: hair like a burning bush, torso a ballerina’s. I am jealous of the fluid way he draws his shoulders back into a cat arch, sews his cigarette between his lips; just a breath above the surface before diving back in. He contemplates the Amazon Tower, spews steam, and spits at its feet. He feels my gaze and glances back. Here’s the dull chest-punch of recognition. We’ve met before.
Edgar uses his cigarette as a conductor would, swirls the red notch. “Can you believe this shit?”
As taut as a violinist’s string, I sing: “Ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Anything for progress, huh?” He cuts a dimple for me and grinds his cigarette beneath his toe.
I am rapt as he rolls another cigarette and passes it to me. It feels beyond me to dismiss Edgar’s cigarette, but I think of Remy’s soft cry of good morning; my breath a nightmare baptism upon her buttercream rolls. I think of the way her yawn drowns her face.
“I quit.”
Edgar sniffs. “I heard that’s not all you did.”
There’s a hissing. I think it’s coming from inside the house, so to speak: tinnitis from twelve-plus years of playing gigs and clubbing; I am a half-cracked bottle of Coke. But Edgar twitches toward the pink tube like a rabbit in the center of the road.
“The fuck is that?”
We walk toward the pipe. I bang my beer bottle against my thigh until I align myself with him, the stink of the club, the bodies, the ache. The hissing is louder; a full-on tizzy fit; Edgar’s mother’s kettle on Christmas Eve eight years ago.
Two bolts spring from the pink tube like eyeballs popping from a cartoon character in love. They drop to the cement. For a moment, there’s silence, and I feel it: the urgent desire to glide my fingers through Edgar’s, not unlike flitting them across a field of wheat. Then, the burst. Water, more than I’ve seen all at once, rips the pipe apart. Within seconds, it’s to our ankles. A siren like a fingernail through my eardrum. We splash toward the staircase and whip toward Warschauer Straße, where we hover over the bridge, gasping for breath, observing the gush.
We watch the news all week to make sense of it. German newscaster with a yellow helmet haircut: our modern Orson Welles. Meikel wide-legged on the floor, fingers taut spiders on the Turkish rug, Remy on her stomach between his calves. I refill mugs with coffee that goes rank and cold and switch to beer too soon. Although I watch his face for clues, the twitch at the sharp cheekbone, eyes like lighthouses on a tumultuous horizon, Meikel will not say he’s scared. It’s the same relaying of facts: twelve pink pipes burst across the city, from Treptower Park to the Tiergarten; Tempelhofer Feld to Wedding. Too much construction, maybe. Too much growth. “Der Riss” is what they’re calling it: a crack, a rift. We haven’t left our block since it happened, but photos circulate. Geologists dismiss the idea, but it’s as though there is a tectonic shift directly at the Ring-Bahn, the train that encircles the city. Berlin sifts downward like flour in a measuring cup.
“Fifteen centimeters below sea level,” Meikel reports. “And losing a few more every day.”
“Maybe it will stop,” I say.
We haven’t taken Remy out since it happened. She’s cooped up, play dough hands rattling the balcony window, skin the sour leftovers in a pickle jar. I think of the list of instructions from her preschool teacher, unfurl it from the paper recycling, and read instructions two through four.
2. Stockpile dried fruits and vegetables and cured meats.
3. Beware of barotrauma; breathe deeply.
4. Insert image here.
No one answers at the preschool when I call. Frau Schnitzler has no online presence. I joke to Meikel she’s an oracle. He reminds me people have died.
The refrigerator is empty, and I walk down streets with a tint of swamp air, a water glass that has been left on a counter for too long. Most cafés and bars are latched shut, but traditional German kneipe remain open; smoke shivers from door frames to knit itself into the fog. An old man on the corner smiles at me, teeth like Indian corn, says something about the weather, and sputters with laughter. “Wir gehen unter.” He says it the way Edgar used to tell me he loved me; a hilarious tragedy.
In the hour-long line at the grocery store, I acknowledge my phone’s stack of unread messages from Edgar. I no longer know where he lives, but it’s not hard to picture him: a shivery comedown; a fetus around his fifteen-year-old MacBook; philosophizing Der Riss with matches from dating apps. Not unlike all the times he cheated on me. Behind me in line are girls from France who’ve stuffed their baskets with Lebkuchen, green cheeses, and spits of spring onions. In front of me is a man in a cowboy hat and blue sweatpants with a wet stain on the ass. He is buying sugar-free jell-o—fourteen boxes of it.
“What do you think of all this?” Cowboy asks me in a Scandinavian accent.
I shrug.
Cowboy eyes the condoms lodged between the frozen pizza boxes and cured sausages. “I see you got your priorities straight.”
“Why the jell-o?”
His face is stony. “Good a time as any to lose weight.”
Meikel makes the appointment with the real estate agent when we’re two feet under. The house is in east Brandenburg; jewel-colored pool; basement sauna; shutterless windows like lashless eyes. “It is better to raise children in nature,” Meikel says. “For their health.”
I make a big show of packing the diaper bag. The foundation of the apartment crackles like a dock on the ocean, slats of our wooden floor shift. A bottle snaps from my hand to the kitchen floor. Milky burst.
“Fuck.” I crouch to stamp a red kitchen towel over the stain; inhale a sour bubble of air. “I just remembered. I have a meeting.”
I tell him Der Riss is a boon for illustrators. Newspapers and influencers and environmentalist groups crave to show what simple photographs cannot. They want creative projections. Beautiful devastation. “Remember what you said. More clients. More capital.” I wring the towel over the sink like it’s a chicken’s neck. “Remy’s future.”
Meikel’s irises crystallize when I parrot him. Here’s a kiss long and deep. “Should I reschedule the viewing?” I tell him I trust him. We don’t have much time.
On the news there’s a two-foot-tall waterfall on the river Spree between Jungfernheide and Westend. Inflatable rings, paddle and surfboards, rafted mattresses float to the edge and nose-dive, their cargo beer-bellied pre-pension punks flinging Sterni, girls in spangly bras, braying dogs. All this in January. Someone ties his raft to a tree on shore and plays techno; ripples from the music are swallowed into the falls.
Meikel sends what must be fifty-seven photographs of the country house, its yellow fields and young forests, Remy with her fingers caked in mud. Phone vibrations shiver in my pants pocket on the floor. Edgar rolls a cigarette, and flecks of tobacco float across the dense curls of my chest. He says it: we are better at sex than before. Thinking of Meikel carrying Remy through a sun-dappled wood, I’d forced his hand around my neck and he’d squeezed, dimming the world, dappling it with black spots. “Can’t believe you had a kid.” Edgar puffs perfect smoke rings. “It’s not like it was a fucking mistake.”
I want to tell him that mistakes aren’t the same as accidents; that they take longer to reveal themselves.
I put on boxers and call Meikel from Edgar’s bathroom. Razor blade crackly with dried blood by the faucet; bar of soap scribbled with pubes. Meikel answers on the third ring and says the competition for the place is fierce. He offered; went higher than he’d planned. “I can see us here.” It’s a daydream entirely un-Meikel-like, caught up in the affairs of the heart. And then: “It will need a new roof before next winter. We must be wary of the Hausgeld. It can be steep.”
The protests start when we’re six feet under. Imports of goods have stalled; grocery stores domineer like abandoned cathedrals. An accident involving an eighteen-wheeler, der Riss, and twenty-five stolen boxes of beer incites Wild West-style attacks on future attempted shipments. Think: black market fruit and veg, stolen meat fuzzy with fruit flies, rumors of stockpiled drugs and booze in old bunkers, closets of internet start-ups, retirement facilities. Kotti, Brandenburger Tor, Frankfurter Allee thrash with painted signs and purr with megaphones. The gist: “You can’t leave us down here like this.” The government issues a statement that it refuses to translate. Meikel says the tone is like: “You can always go back where you came from.”
Flight prices skyrocket.
Late February, we drop another two feet overnight; your stomach at a break-up text; your heart when it’s all too much. Sophie calls Meikel to announce: “It’s time to go home.” Cardboard boxes yawn around us in the living room, slot into the corners, hunker in expectant stacks. Meikel reminds her: “There are three rooms in Brandenburg. One is yours if you want.” I don’t notice when Remy hides in an empty box; don’t notice till she teeters face-first. A crack like an eggshell to the edge of a bowl. Pinks and blues swan into the buttercream tissue of her forehead. The three of us sob for hours. We sob to delirium. I take the first nightshift to keep her awake, and she calls for Meikel, mouth like the violent red underside of a poisonous mushroom. Mouth like it knows what I am.
There is work to uphold the lie that clients exist. Locked in my office, I draw Berlin deep below sea level: a swamp, its creatures pale green and ghoulish and web-fingered; its sun distant and pulsing weakly like the heart of a fish drying out on the beach. I imagine its creatures subsisting on whatever we can find. Mud and crumbly slate rooftops. Irreparable iPhones and faxes and printers. Ikea cushions gummy with maggots.
Meikel plans our move to Brandenburg in March. “The preschool has confirmed.”
We meet Sophie at an “official exit zone” near Treptower Park. A staircase from this level to the next is monitored by Ordnungsamt employees in blue, swishy suits. They bark orders like the crew on a sinking ship: at the height of their power.
Sophie carries a bulky hiking backpack. She’s skinny; her post-pregnancy paunch has swallowed itself. When Meikel first asked her to carry our baby, she’d said: “These abs didn’t make anyone love me, anyway.”
We’d paid her enough to cut an album nobody listened to. A new computer. Three years’ rent.
She hugs Meikel first, then me. Light pats on my upper back like she’s swatting dandruff. We stuff her backpack in the stroller so she can carry Remy on her hip. Meikel pops all ten of his fingers one by one, like the switches in a fuse box. Remy and Sophie coo at each other, speaking a language we’ll never understand.
Meikel had said it was obvious whose zygote to use. “Yours is the healthiest. It has the best chance.”
It’s the first time I’ve seen Der Riss this close. It’s at least twelve feet high, a jagged wall of mud and rock fudged above the crumbling foundations left behind when the city was razed in the war. CLIT is painted like rings on a tree, marking each shift. Children shove sticks into earth tough as raw meat. Homemade skateboard ramps; falafel and beer stalls; drunk protestors; rank clouds of weed stretch north and south. Fireworks explode with each drop.
On the edge above us is a sloppy razor-link fence. Germans walk behind it, shining in metallic puffy coats, served on a platter for the sun.
Meikel takes Remy behind a tree to change her. Sophie and I are rarely alone anymore, and my shoulders drape forward like clothing forgotten on a chair. She knows me better than anyone, probably. We both hate it.
She tucks a curl behind her ear. “I never thought it would end like this.”
She tells me what she hasn’t told Meikel. That she stopped making music. That she even quit graphic design.
Meikel thinks it’s indecent to give up.
“But you. All this illustration work. The house. Brandenburg.” Sophie wets her lips. Her eyes like punctures in a curtain, bringing in too much light. “That’s really something.”
“Yeah.”
A young woman roller skates up a ramp and drops like a ragdoll. Four Ordnungsamt workers leap into an official van, sound the alarm, and tear across the grass to yell at her.
“I ran into Edgar the other day,” I say.
Sophie drops her head back like a PEZ dispenser. There’s something too slender about her neck. It’s like a dying reed. We hear Remy’s giggles coming closer. Meikel tosses her up and catches her.
“You were never very good at keeping your own secrets,” Sophie says before he gets close enough to hear.
Conspiracy theorists deem Berlin a failed experiment. It’s tax related. It’s immigration. “Someone flipped a switch and sent us under,” a man dressed as a leprechaun explains on the news. It’s three weeks till St. Patrick’s Day, but there is something about the end times. It makes us do stylish things.
Edgar calls it The Great Pimple Pop. He draws slug-like bars with his insurance card on a mirror, rattles it up with a five-euro bill, and pumps to the window, his curls shaking. Ghastly light comes through the glass like coffee through a filter. I take two bumps. Details of my real life drizzle chemically down the back of my throat: the professional movers hired to transport furniture to Brandenburg tomorrow morning; Meikel’s orders to Abmeldung; Remy up all night with a cough like a lawnmower (toddler bed screeching like an emergency alarm); vaccination requirements for all who journey Above.
A mirror sticker sports Edgar’s old band name. Stupid teenaged Nirvana-fan bullshit. I’d said so seven years ago. Post-gig at Trickster. Black jeans like an ancient chalkboard. The calculated click to his face; the puzzle of me coming together in a disappointing finish. He’d kissed redheaded Cara against the cement wall, eyes locked on me, arms like the shivering tentacles of a creature so far beneath the water it has never once felt the light.
I’d taken refuge at Sophie’s. Sleeping in her bed. Fumbling in the dark. Waiting for Edgar to write.
When I’d left her, she’d said: “Let me know when you’re ready for something real.”
Edgar entwines himself with me on the yellow mattress. There’s a divet under my head, carved out from so many bodies, so many stories, so many names; blood pools at the rounded nub of my skull. I remember the first time I spent the night at Meikel’s; the lilac detergent of his sterling white pillows. The froth of bathtub suds.
Edgar’s breath is hot. “Remember that time you ghosted me? Remember that time you gave up?”
I want to tell him he has a talent for revision. But even I’m questioning the truth.
Edgar says, “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
Edgar says, “It’s always been you and me.”
The news reports a state of emergency three days after Meikel and Remy depart for Brandenburg. It feels like last call. I am poured across the living room floor between a box labeled “kitchen” and an art deco lamp. I am drinking champagne from the throat. “Leave it to be looted,” Meikel had said of the bottles in the cabinet, leftover congratulations for Remy’s birth. “Someone will need it more than we.”
“Us,” I’d corrected. “Need it more than us.”
Meikel texts a photo of Remy outside the new house. Spindly branches on the tree burgeon with hard green buds. She wears a yellow hat I don’t recognize and reaches plump fingers for the phone.
Meikel texts: “It will soon be too tall to escape.”
I stayed behind to tie up loose ends: meetings with clients; something about my visa that Meikel wouldn’t understand; a bank transfer from America I’m still waiting for. I said I’d be there soon.
The walls and desk of my office are covered with layers of illustrations. Berlin as a pulsating ecosystem; Berlin as mold inside a tropical fruit; Berlin frothing with hungry, lung-less creatures. Their faces Edgar’s. Mine. I snap a lighter to the corner of an A4 sheet and it briefly ignites and then fizzes into smoke, like trying to set a pile of wet newspapers on fire.
Out the window, Der Riss shimmers a few feet above the top of Friedrichshain rooftops like a mirage. Lichtenburg like Cinque Terre, clinging to the edge of the cliff.
Edgar and I arrange to meet at a new club at Schönleinstraße. Planning is imperative; cell service is on the brink of collapse. I imagine us throwing our phones into the Landwehrkanal as Der Riss cradles us, our souls swallowing each other up like cells in a petri dish. I imagine the future. We’ll squat in immaculate apartments, sweep their liquor cabinets, perform the luxuries of unlimited time. Braided hair and kissed eyelids. So many songs.
I fill a backpack with shirts and boxers and leave the apartment. My lungs feel like popped paper bags, unfillable and fluttering. At the crosswalk before Oberbaumbrücke I remember Meikel on a ghoulish Sunday at five a.m., demanding I wait till the red man turned green. “Think of the children,” he’d said. “How else will they learn?” The crosswalk doesn’t work today. Any cars on the road are joyriders and chaos-seekers, pedal to the metal, tires squealing like kicked puppies. They go in circles around the city. They crash headfirst on Der Riss.
Pedestrian deaths are no longer marked.
The club is an abandoned apartment building: six floors of homes that rot and change like an untended pool returning to nature. Couches are shoved along walls and singed with cigarettes; bedrooms once for restful sleep are now dark rooms rank with sweat and seizing; hanging photographs of families are graffitied beyond recognition; the hallways are dank, the air sludge-like and filled with piss.
I order a Sterni at the downstairs bar and wait for Edgar. An Australian bartender slides the bottle along the counter as the ground shivers and drops beneath us – further than I remember us ever going before, like cliff jumping into an abyss. When the ground settles, bar dwellers cheer and clack their bottles together. A trick of the light makes me think their eyes are pulling out of their head, like those of lizards or fish. They’re googly. It occurs to me I haven’t looked in the mirror in months. The ceiling throbs with techno.
“They’re calling it!” the bartender whoops, flashing a phone screen for those near him to see.
On screen, Ordnungsamt workers close off an “exit zone” with a large fence and four sharp whacks of a hammer. The stairs that led up to it are now insufficient, cowering. Berlin is legions below. It looks like an ancient map of a dead civilization. It’ll be days before the TV Tower is drenched in shadow. Weeks before we’re swallowed up. I remember cartoons back home; how often they’d projected death-by-quicksand. I order another beer. Edgar should be close.
“I can’t help it, man,” the bartender is saying to his buddy as he swings me a beer and flashes his hair behind his ears. I plant two euros in his palm. “I can’t help but feel we’re really free. You know?”
Allison Krupp is an American author of twisty literary fiction, horror, and short fiction. She lives in Berlin. When she isn’t writing, you can find her on an Italian coastline with a horror novel that will keep her up all night. She is repped by Grace Milusich at Looking Glass Literary and Media.
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