Flooded Beach

I am living in a small shack on the beach of an island with my toddler. We came for a vacation and never left. My toddler pulls me outside to point at the horizon where a storm is building. I walk to the store to get a few things before it comes in. I need a refill on my antidepressants, but the woman at the store can't open the pharmacy, and the pharmacist is gone. I wonder how I'll get through the next few days without it. Then I watch with building horror as the woman starts shuttering things to lock up for the storm. It finally occurs to me that our little shack on the beach will not survive what is coming. My toddler and I take refuge with the family who owns the store. They live on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the building, and it is partway up a hill from the beach. The water comes into the house anyway and keeps rising. We escape with the family, who have 2 preteen sons, out the attic, scrambling up the rest of the hill. We walk across the flat, mesa-like hill while water pours down and swirls around us. When we get to the other side, we see that the beach town there is sitting under blue skies. When the water has gone, we go back to the family's house, and we move in with them.

Then I'm suddenly a man, and my child is preteen girl. I claim to be a novelist, but I am working at the other village making and painting ceramics. I'm very brooding. My daughter sneaks out of our rooms in the house one night and goes to meet one of the young men in his bedroom. I catch her there and yell about how I've given her everything and this is how she repays me. I pull out a large case that, as the observer, I am scared contains a gun, but it is some sort of giant compass. I need it to write. I have realized that I have created this situation by refusing to write, and now it's my job to fix it.