“What’s that howling, mama?” a little girl asks sleepily from her pallet of rags. It is 2399, and she and her clan have claimed this floating junkyard from the hordes of sea scavengers. They are safe for the night, guarded by their loyal robot bears. “What’s that howling on the wind?” The mother stirs. She listens, her gentle face haunted and careworn. “Ah,” she says on a long breath. “That is tumblr user Rave Sashayed.” “Who’s that, mama?” She lived many years ago, in a city now many fathoms underwater, where this floating trash island now floats. “What happened to her, mama?” Well, one day, she saw some pictures of Harry Styles, in Rio de Janeiro, wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Hot N Hard,' his long hair greasy and tousled, rubbing needily up on wildly handsome older man Ben Winston, right into his throat, where he probably smells like fancy L'Occitane aftershave, like some kind of crazy ass kept-boy sugar-baby SEX KITTEN FANTASY FICTION that she cooked up in her own HEAD, but it was REAL!!!!!, and gorgeous brick shithouse plagiarist Ben Winston was drinking ROSÉ and wearing a FANCY WATCH. “What happened then?” the little girl whispers. Her mother says, “She died, screaming. She screamed herself to death, and you hear her ghost still screaming on the wind.” The little girl is silent. “Who was Harry Styles, mama?” she asks, after a long time. “Oh, he was a teenager in a boy band,” her mother says softly. As they listen, trembling with fear and exhaustion, the howls seem to coalesce into language: a single voice calling across the centuries. U M M M M H E W A S N T A T E E N A G E R H E W A S T W E N T Y, it cries defensively.
