THE FLOOD

Everything Maggie has in her cart—the pink blouse, the skirt, the sweater with daisies embroidered along the sleeves—is stained. She tries them on in the changing room and picks at the maroon flecks on the blouse’s lapel, the tear shaped smear on the hem of the skirt. Together they are an outfit. Maggie turns and looks over her shoulder. If she buys this she will also need shoes and she will need to pick the staples out carefully so the fabric doesn’t snag. In total, she will pay $7.95. In her purse she has a ten and two ones. Also a package of Kleenex, two dead pens, her glasses, a gun, a wrapper from McDonald’s, a fragment from a porcelain bowl.

It has kept raining and the water pools at the corners where the storm drains have clogged with leaves and dead limbs. Trash floats down from the houses and the water rises. Walt stands on the porch and watches a red plastic cup float and bob in circles. One lip dips under the oily water and it fills, tips upright, sinks. Walt kicks a rock off the porch and it sinks. He kicks the flowerpot off. He finishes his beer and throws the can.

Some of the streets are impassible. Police cars park diagonally across them and Maggie has to stop, back up into people’s driveways, and find another way around. On the bad streets, or when she drives too close to the curb, water seeps up through the floor boards. She can feel her shoes starting to soak through at the sides, but the police are everywhere, blocking the roads, waving cars over and asking the drivers to roll down their windows. Maggie turns the windshield wipers up to their highest setting and still she can’t see. She turns down a new street, but it’s a dead end and she has to back up quickly, turn around. The car stalls out and for a minute Maggie sits still in the middle of a widening road. 

The river overflows its banks, drowning the saplings and the brush. It rises over the riverwalk and into the parking lot, through the parking lot and out onto the River Parkway where it spreads like a mirror. Houses in the area flood from the basement up—some losing siding to the current, some with their windows broken by the weight of water and mud. Still, the flood does not seem violent. Downtown, several power lines are snapped by a falling limb and the power fails. The roof of Betty’s Beauties caves in completely and the Pizza Hut closes and sandbags its doors. The river is implacable and it rises.

Walt waits in the kitchen reading the newspaper. He finishes the sports page, stands up and walks into the living room where he wads the paper up and stuffs it into the gap in the window frame. The Editorial page is there already, and the Comics. They are gray and starting to disintegrate. Walt walks back to the kitchen and steps on a shard of the porcelain bowl which cuts his foot. He swears and hops, holding his cut foot with both hands. A sliver of porcelain is still in the wound and he picks it out carefully and limps to the refrigerator for a beer. He leaves smears of blood on the linoleum, but at the refrigerator he drinks the beer in four chugs and crushes the can.

bang. bang.

“I don’t care. You think I care? Don’t you tell me what I care about.
Don’t you think you can tell me what I care about.”

“Stop it! Shut up!”

In parts of the town, the water has a rainbow sheen from the oil on the roadways or gasoline cans tipped over in people’s sheds. In other parts, the water is dark and silty from the topsoil washed out of gardens or red from the clay that washed down from hills and embankments. The last train to make it through before they shut down the line sprayed a fountain of water off the tracks on either side. In some parts of town, red bloomed in the water like sick roses, then like a tide.

Maggie breaths so hard she can feel the inside of her lungs expanding, maybe tearing. She imagines the fissures in there, in her lungs, the red cracks that lace through her. At first, when the car will not start, the panic is worse, but then the engine catches and turns over. Maggie shoves her purse underneath the driver’s seat and pulls up to the corner. She is careful to signal and she drives slowly. Soon, she is calmer, then calm. Even so, when the train whistles Maggie begins to gasp again. She imagines being stuck at the crossroads where people will look over and see her—her face, the stains on her clothes—but the train is far away and it moves fast. She turns right onto the main road.

Walt wades out into the front yard and the water is up to his knees. To the right, where the tractor tire is, the water parts and eddies. Walt wades to the tire and braces his knees against it. Then he bends over and leans on it using his hands as a support. The water laps his forearms and it is cold. Walt imagines what it would feel like to lie down in his front yard with the water over him. He closes his eyes and thinks for a minute he has fallen, that he is underwater with the grass below him, the plastic garden gnome near his knees. He opens his eyes and cannot tell if it is true, or if that is the sky after all, above him and through the trees.