The Florida Regiment

by Denise Robbins

About the Author: Denise Robbins is a writer and climate change activist based in Washington, DC. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Cagibi, Cleaning Up Glitter, the Book Smuggler's Den, and forthcoming in The Finger and Briars Lit. She also co-authored a non-fiction book called "Rising Tides: Climate Change Refugees in the Twenty-First Century," which was published by Indiana University Press in 2017. She has a cat named elephant who has grown into her name.

Excerpt

The first message was “murder.” 

It came by plastic flamingo. A note tied on a string around its wire leg. 

A warning. 

I found it just before dawn. An hour when the only suckers not sleeping were either the riff-raff from the night before or the psycho do-gooders doing a downward-facing-dog. 

And me. 

Four-thirty in the goddamn morning. Unable to sleep, unable to think, unable to avoid the pounding in my head. I threw on a windbreaker to go for a walk. And there it was: facing my front door like it meant to invite itself in for breakfast. One plastic flamingo, staring right at me with its stupid dead plastic eyes. 

This message, well, it did me a knocker. My hands shook as I untied the string. My legs wobbled as I pulled the flamingo inside, shut the door, threw the thing into the basement. I didn’t look as it clattered down the stairs into the dark. 

I knew there could only be one person behind this. My nemesis. 

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