The Automatik

New Orleans and its surrounding cities and neighborhoods are no longer as I knew them. The coast of Mississippi has been changed forever. Bay St. Louis, Waveland, and Pass Christian are nothing but felled trees and splintered wood. My father and stepmother’s house has been crushed by a 20-foot storm surge that wreaked destruction five miles inland, lifting up their van and spinning it around and floating three strange sofas into their shattered and now-exposed living room. Their neighbors’ roof is now in their backyard, but there is no sign of the rest of that house. Even if they didn’t lose their houses outright, many members of my family, not to mention nearly everyone else I know that still lives there, have been rendered homeless and jobless for the foreseeable future.
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