Fiction

Two men, both shirtless, each holding an axe, and one, a gnarled saw, waded through waist-deep water toward a two-story house that emerged, strained, heavy with each waterlogged board and each rusted nail that pinned it together, from the soggy earth.  When they reached the doorway of the house, the first man laid his hand flat against the front door.  With effort, he pressed against the damp wood, and from the exposed upper hinge a shriek, the spoiled union of iron and air, echoed shrilly down an empty street, piercing the soft surfaces of damp wood and bouncing freely off the dark, swirling surface of the river. 

The water had been rising, now, for seven days.  On the first morning, without a sound, the cattle in the fields had begun to walk away from the river.  For three days they walked, slowly, heavily, as cows do, each purposeful step crumpling the grass and pressing down the wet soil beneath it, leaving an ever-growing half moon of pockmarked earth behind.  The townspeople noticed the cows before they noticed the rising water.

On the fourth day, the mill reversed direction.  The water, thick and dark, had risen above the axle of the wooden wheel, and when the swirling surface water overpowered the quiet channel below, the wheel slowed, and creaked, and began to turn again in reverse, snapping gears and mutilating machinery.  Then, when the sullen current licked a final splash up over the churning woodwork, it groaned to a stop, and everything was quiet.

On the fifth day, the doctor could be seen piling armloads of damp clothing into the back of an old horse cart.  Next to the cart, his wife and her four daughters, all barefoot and muddy up to their ankles, stared upward without speaking.  They watched for rain, but there was none to be seen, only clouds, and crows.  Most flew west, with the current, but some could be seen returning, circling and watching the river as it sucked up the land and pulled anxiously at the lowest boards of houses.  When the doctor’s wife drove his horse toward the road, the women clinging tightly to the dripping cargo, the wheels of the cart left grooves as deep as a man’s hand in the black ground.

On the sixth day the water turned salty.  Now, bits of splintered board could be seen drifting down the river, passing through the sunken windows of riverside sheds and picking up thick tangles of weeds.  The water, now spilling through doorways and puddling in dirty circles on the floors of empty houses, had washed away the grooves of a dozen horse carts, and twenty miles west, along the river, hungry donkeys dragged hungry families through thick mud, toward desperate hopes of dry inns and warm meals.  The cattle, which had been migrating steadily, ignored by humans, for almost a week, huddled on a hill two miles from the muddy bank of the river, chewing mouthfuls of muddy grass and blinking dumbly at the flat sky.