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In this exclusive extract from Wasafiri 121, writer and geologist Elizabeth Wong's ecofiction explores privilege and passing, climate degradation, and the tenuous status of not 'refugees' or 'migrants', but the 'landless' — all against the backdrop of an elite hotel in Monte Carlo.
You can download the full story for free during the month of May 2025, or read it in the print issue of Wasafiri 121, which is available to order now.
The front balcony of the casino is usually deserted, shunned by seasonaires for the lack of air-conditioning. In the afternoons, when everyone is at the pool, Poppy would slip away to the balcony, where she lets the heat sit on her upturned face. She keeps her eyes closed. The saltation of sand grains abrades her skin. The wind is rough like a hoarse cough from a person whose cancer has spread to their bones.
A cleansing, she thinks, but she is not sure who the cleansing is for; the skeleton sea remains desiccated, the cliffs glow white-hot in the sun.
Today, though, Mattia has found her in her secret place. ‘First one this season’, he says.
For a moment she is startled, and then she realises that he is looking at the cliffs in the distance. There is a shadow half-way up. A landless. Why climb now, so late in the day? A death wish; the rocks burn with a full day of absorbed warmth. Either he slips and falls, or he is shot later. Either way, it results in death.
‘Did you know’, Mattia continues offhandedly, as if it is just another day at Monte Carlo, ‘the steepness of the beach is inversely proportional to the size of its grains?’
She does not come to the casinos of Monte Carlo to think of sand grains. She thinks of aerial yoga, iced Aperol spritz by the pool, late-night finger buffets, one-shoulder gowns by Inés de Saint-Rémy.
In the distance, the landless continues to climb.
Mattia says, ‘When the grains of a beach are small, say, fine sand or mud, the beach would be very flat, as the slope can’t maintain a steeper angle, or the grains would slide.’ He slips the palms of his hands together – the motion of someone sliding, falling – and then gestures at the sharp-cut cliffs in front of them. ‘And when the grains are large, like these boulders, they form steep beaches.’
She makes herself examine the inert boulders below, worn down by dust and heat, peeling like onions. How many people have died there. Their bones, hearts, kidneys, stomachs, lips, rubbery dead things, cracked, cooked on the hot boulders, a nursery rhyme turned bad. Head, shoulders, knees, and toes. And eyes and ears and mouth and nose.
‘Except this is not really a beach, is it?’ she says. ‘Just a remnant of one.’ The ghostly Mediterranean Sea lapping at the cliffs. Somewhere out here are the new villages, where her aunt and four cousins live.
The landless is now three-quarters to the top. Mattia shouts, ‘Don’t fall!’
If she could warn this person, she would say: Go back, don’t come to Monte Carlo, the game is not worth it.
Mattia says, ‘I would put money on him.’
She wants to take off this stupid gown, why is she even here? The ads promised the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to meet other eligible landowners. After all, she has just been recently made mortgage-free, so why not.
She signed up for a season, only to find herself with just Mattia for company — not a romantic partnership but a clingy dependency, like an old sexless couple. Mattia – Matt to friends – has large holdings of land in the once-Italian Pennine Alps and hence is disgustingly wealthy.
In the distance, the landless staggers over the top of the cliff. He is safe, for now.
‘He made it! The first landless of this season! The variance favours him!’ Matt does a little dance.
She wants to spit at Matt.
*
Many of the landless are shot before they even see the cliffs, let alone climb them. Their bodies lie in the strip of land that separates the highlands of Great Europe from the new villages.
*
Three months ago, when Poppy first arrived at the casinos of Monte Carlo, she called the landless ‘refugees’, but quickly learned that that word was unacceptable. As was the word ‘migrants’. Louise said that it was all in the context. Louise had one of the single rooms in the east wing, next to Poppy’s, and that was why they are friends.
Louise grew up in London and left before it became too hot, at which point her family moved to their former ski chalet in the Pyrenees. ‘Only a very small one’, she explained, ‘only four bedrooms, with not much land, and not high up in elevation.’
She told Poppy, ‘If you say “refugee”, I think of someone who fled their country because of war, and it’s not their fault. And if you say “migrant”, I think of someone who has moved for better opportunities. But these people are neither refugees nor migrants. They are just … landless.’
Poppy tried to argue. ‘Surely these words are two sides of the same coin. Surely these people are refugees as well, escaping places that are now too hot to live in. People like her aunt and cousins who used to live in Malaysia, but left when the country got too hot, and the Chinese and Indian minorities persecuted for not being Muslim — are they not refugees? Surely the price of land is too expensive, hoarded by a few landowners —.’
Louise cut her off. ‘My family took out a multi-generational sixty-year mortgage to buy our chalet. The debt was finally paid off last year. That is why I got to come to Monte Carlo this season. I am here not because of privilege. This is several lifetimes of hard work — my father, my mother, my grandfather, working into their eighties with two jobs. Why should the price of land be lower? Our family has sacrificed so much.’ Louise took a breath. Poppy made a small sound, a signal to add to the conversation but Louise ignored it. ‘And it’s not like the landless are homeless. The government has built the new villages for them to live in.’
‘But the new villages … ’ Poppy read a report, she had seen the documentaries, it was like living in hell. The heat, the dust —
‘The new villages have water, food, jobs, shelter. And it was their choice to come. If they don’t like it, then they can go back to their own country.’
Poppy would have argued, but her social status at Monte Carlo was perilous: a single female, with only one small three-bedroom house in the low elevations of the English Pennines. And although this sentiment was only obliquely referenced, she knew that being half-Asian made her not quite one of them, not quite a full-paying member of this society, even as she was careful to keep herself culturally white, her half-Asianness kept sunken like the bottom of an iceberg — dark, secret, silent. So, she made a sound that indicated an end to the conversation but not necessarily that she agreed.
Several weeks after, Louise coupled up with a woman who inherited two farms in the Julian Alps, and they moved into a double room in the west wing. Poppy rarely saw her after that ...
Read the full story here, free to access and download for the month of May 2025 only.
Image: 'Monte Carlo seen from Roquebrune' by Claude Monet via WikiArt
