This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
400 miles back south, two hours after the governor wrapped her meeting, and 17 stories up a Midtown condominium she couldn’t afford, Cynthia Burgos regained consciousness face down on her living room couch.
It was a Thursday.
Cynthia half-opened an eye and blearily surveyed her surroundings. Two mostly empty bottles of drugstore wine—one had tipped over and stained her grayscale IKEA carpet—lay before her on the floor. The seven-year-old Dell laptop she’d never returned to an employer was propped open on her IKEA coffee table (all her was poorly assembled Swedish particle board).
Late-morning light and hot South Florida air streamed into the apartment from an ajar sliding glass balcony door behind the couch. The humidity had condensed into water droplets that now covered the walls, open plan kitchen countertop, refrigerator, and every other flat surface.
Cynthia wiped a sweaty hand across her sweaty forehead, half opened her other eye, and sat up on the couch. She measured five feet seven inches when she wasn’t slouching—a stratospheric height in Miami, where most men stood a head shorter than her when she wore heels. Her straight dark hair fell just past her shoulders, and she had been putting off the decision to either let her bangs grow out or trim them because they kept falling into her eyes. Her naturally tanned complexion made her look, as she put it, “generically ethnic,” though, since she lived in South Florida, everyone correctly assumed she was Latina—usually Cuban, occasionally Dominican, but never (to her slight annoyance) did they correctly guess her heritage.
Cynthia tried to recollect the previous night’s sequence of events. Did she have someone over? She looked down at her clothes—a sweaty, oversized hoodie and sweaty, oversized Sponge Bob pajama pants—and intuited that she probably hadn’t. She vaguely remembered polishing off a bottle of wine while watching Bridgerton on the couch, masturbating to that one scene where Anthony goes to town on Kate in the manse grounds, starting the second bottle of wine, and then nothing.
She rose uneasily to her feet, tripped over the one upright wine bottle, tripped again over a pile of unfolded laundry, and walked behind the couch to shut the balcony door.
Cynthia stared briefly out the western-facing glass at the entire width of Miami-Dade County without really processing what she saw.
Bulge.
Cynthia blinked hard and stumbled to the bathroom.
She opened the faucet and splashed lukewarm water on her face. Cynthia stood upright and glanced at the medicine cabinet mirror, which reflected the view out the bathroom window.
Bulge.
She squeezed too much toothpaste onto her toothbrush, began brushing her teeth, and shut the medicine cabinet mirror, shifting the reflection to the bathroom wall.
She had absolutely slayed in her halcyon college days and could still pull plenty of men and women, but the whole dating app game left her demoralized and tired. Plus, the sex ranged from bad to mediocre.
Despite her on-paper sexual prowess, Cynthia was thoroughly dissatisfied with her appearance. She hated the cellulite on her thighs. She hated the 15 pounds she had gained in the last few years and the corresponding FUPA that made her perform a Cassock folk dance every time she donned jeans. She hated that her breasts sagged more than they used to. She hated the bags under her eyes and the fuller cheeks she saw in the bathroom mirror.
She was, in other words, reacting in a perfectly rational manner to being literally surrounded by BBLs, breast implants, Ozempic prescriptions, liposuction, and the biology-defying body types they created. Not that she did anything to improve her health. She bought a Peloton during the pandemic that now served as a $1,250 clothes rack. She also had a set of free weights in storage while her running shoes lay forgotten in the back of her closet. Or maybe somewhere in the trunk of her car.
She spat out the toothpaste, rinsed her mouth, and walked through the living room and into the kitchen, where she poured herself a bowl of cereal. She placed the first spoonful in her mouth, chewed, and stared pensively over the counter and out the sliding glass door.
Bulge.
Cynthia walked to the wobbly dining room table, sat on a wobbly chair facing the balcony, shoveled cereal into her mouth, and ruminated on how she arrived at her present predicament in which, at 32, her once promising journalistic career had ground to a halt.
She was raised in Miami by Panamanian parents who wanted her to grow up as American as possible—a ridiculous notion, since they chose to move to a city that was 70% Hispanic—so she never learned to speak Spanish or much else about her mother culture.
A Columbia University graduate, Cynthia was hired out of college to the New York Times’ Metro desk. Despite having to occasionally deflect unwanted passes from more senior journalists, she thought she had it made. Cynthia was living in Queens, working for the most prestigious newspaper in the world, and writing pieces read by millions, until her position was cut three years later along with half the staff.
After unceremoniously moving back to her hometown, she had been hired by the Miami Herald to cover climate and conservation. Sure, the pay wasn’t as good and the city wasn’t as exciting, but her work was still important. Cynthia covered Biscayne Bay’s seagrass die-offs and fish kills, hurricanes, plastic pollution, and the ever-rising waters threatening Miami’s very existence. She was even part of a team that received a Pulitzer nomination for a series on Poultry Point’s irradiated crocodiles. Then a private equity firm acquired the Herald and she and 85% of her coworkers were laid off.
Cynthia’s last gig was as the editor-in-chief of a local newsletter. Again, kind of a step down, but she still met fascinating people and covered cool beats. She did in-depth features of South Florida’s most interesting writers, philanthropists, and activists. She was invited to exclusive events and restaurant openings. Plus, it was an outlet with an innovative journalistic business model, an enormous email list, and a good marketing strategy that abruptly folded when its founders absconded to Venezuela with the banking and payroll accounts.
That was three months ago. Cynthia now told anyone who’d listen that she was starting a “grassroots reporting cooperative,” but she mostly drank away her few remaining savings in a soulless, overpriced building in a soulless, overpriced neighborhood almost exclusively populated by soulless, overpriced fast casual restaurants that tossed tree bark, mulch, and grass cuttings into cardboard bowls and sold them to New York and California transplants as “organic, all-natural, prebiotic, artisanal, locavore superfood” for $40 apiece. Really, her apartment’s only redeeming quality was the incredible view which, on clear days, meant she could see all the way to the Everglades, though that was currently blocked by a massive, obfuscating Bulge…
Bulge.
Cynthia shook her head as if to rattle a loose bit of brain into place as it struggled to process the electrical signals her eyes sent.
Bulge.
What… the fuck… was that… Bulge?
Cynthia dropped her spoon and ran to her laptop, which was out of battery. She then ran to her phone, but realized she had no idea where it was. After five minutes of frenetic searching that only served to further worsen the mess in her apartment, she finally found it under the pile of unfolded clothes, also out of battery.
She paced the living room while her phone charged. After a seemingly endless wait, she pounced on the thing as soon as it lit up.
Cynthia scrolled down her news notifications, frantically opening and skimming local and national stories that didn’t describe much beyond what she could see out her window: a giant Bulge mysteriously appeared in the county’s western reaches, it destroyed an entire neighborhood, and no one had any explanations for why or how.
She grimaced as her finger hovered over the number of a former editor at the Herald. After a full minute, she pressed it. He picked up after four rings. The sounds of heavy construction equipment flooded over the phone.
“Harry! Where are you? And what’s happening with this Bulge?” she demanded, her voice still hoarse from the wine and 10 hours of restless sleep.
“I’m exactly where every other journalist within a 500-mile radius is: the Bulge!” he yelled over the din. “The state is setting up a cordon with a barbed wire fence around the neighborhood. They’re not letting anyone in.”
Cynthia held the phone away from her ear as the shrill sound of dump trucks in reverse flooded over the receiver.
“Has Santos’ office given an explanation about what’s happening or why?” asked Cynthia.
“No!” replied Harry. “They’re completely mum, but my source in the Governor’s Mansion tells me she’s about to declare local martial law. No reporters or scientists will be allowed anywhere near the site. Any outlets caught flouting the decree will get their parent company’s pants sued off. They say it’s too dangerous.”
“They don’t know that!” responded Cynthia. “And no one will be able to figure out if and how dangerous the Bulge is without investigating it.”
“Exactly! It’s a case study in classic Floridian circular logic! Well, I’ve got nothing else for you and have to get back to staring at this thing and pretending to report. Good luck!”
He hung up. God, she loathed him.
Cynthia pressed the phone to her temple. Constitutional violations aside, if the state were banning outlets from investigating the Bulge, then that would mean there was a wide-open field for a journalist who didn’t work for an outlet they could sue. What were they going to do? Take her Peloton?
She decided to text her old Poultry Point source from the glowing crocodiles story. She opened Signal, her encrypted messaging app of choice.
Cynthia: Hey, any clue if Poultry Point has something to do with the Bulge? What kind of damage has the plant sustained?
She waited a few minutes until three little dots popped up on the screen.
Source: My desk is piled into a corner with everything else in the office, but it doesn’t look like the reactors or other critical equipment sustained damage. Why do you assume the plant had something to do with the Bulge?
Cynthia: Lol bc nuclear power plants are always prime suspects when bizarre, Lovecraftian things happen to local neighborhoods. Look at Stranger Things, Dark, Chernobyl, The Simpsons, etc. It’s also kind of weird that you’re right at the outskirts of the Bulge.
Source: You watch too much Netflix. As much as I don’t like the idiots running this plant, I don’t see a clear connection between us and the Bulge. It’s not like we’re pumping anything directly underneath Seabreeze Ridge that would cause it to rise.
Cynthia: You never know. Keep an eye out.
Source: OK.
She pursed her lips, stared at her phone, and made one more call.
No answer. She hung up.
Cynthia could practically feel the Pulitzer in her grasp if she could just crack this story.
“Fuck it,” she said.
She peeled off her pajamas, danced into a pair of jeans, threw on a top, put her hair up, grabbed the keys, and ran out the door. She had an hour-long drive ahead of her to the Miccosukee Reservation.
If you like our stories, check out The Miami Creation Myth hardcover.
