Spring does not arrive gently in New Orleans.
It seeps in.
The air grows heavier.
The river grows louder.
And the ground begins to soften beneath the city.
Caelwyn leans against the levee railing, watching the Mississippi move through the night like a dark animal.
Stacy stands beside him with a tablet in her hands.
“You ever notice,” she says, “how people describe spring?”
Caelwyn doesn’t look away from the water.
“Flowers.”
“Birds.”
“Hope.”
She taps the screen.
The light reflects in the river.
“That’s not what the data says.”
He turns slightly.
“Oh?”
She rotates the tablet toward him.
Graphs fill the screen.
Crime.
Disappearances.
Animal attacks.
Every line bends upward in March.
Every year.
Caelwyn studies the pattern.
“Seasonal behavior,” he says.
“Warmer weather.”
“People outside more.”
Stacy shakes her head.
“That explains some of it.”
“Not all.”
She zooms the graph further.
Cemetery disturbances.
Missing bodies.
Ritual markings found near flood channels.
“Those spike too,” she says.
Caelwyn glances toward the French Quarter glowing behind them.
“New Orleans has a lot of cemeteries.”
“Yes.”
“And a lot of ghosts.”
“That’s tourism.”
She closes the tablet.
“This isn’t.”
The river shifts.
A slow wake rolls against the levee stones.
The smell of mud rises from the water.
Old mud.
Caelwyn breathes it in.
“You think spring activates something,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Biological?”
“Partly.”
“Cultural?”
“Also.”
“And the rest?”
Stacy looks toward the city.
Neon lights.
Music drifting through the Quarter.
Tourists laughing somewhere down the street.
“All cities have ghosts,” she says.
“But New Orleans feeds them.”
Caelwyn studies the river again.
“And spring?”
She folds her arms.
“Spring softens the ground.”
He nods slowly.
“And when the ground softens…”
She finishes the thought quietly.
“Things stop staying buried.”
The wind shifts.
Somewhere deeper in the city a church bell rings once.
Caelwyn looks toward the dark river.
“You know what resurrection myths always get wrong?”
“What?”
“They assume the living are the ones coming back.”
Stacy watches the floodlights on the levee.
“No,” she says softly.
“They just assume it’s something they recognize.”
The Mississippi keeps moving south.
Slow.
Heavy.
Like something remembering older maps of the world.
Neither of them looks away.
🜍 BIRTH — Week 1
In New Orleans
spring does not wake the city.
It wakes what the city buried.
🜍 One theme. One month. One descent.
🜍 Birth. Rebirth. Return.
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