Flood
Killinger’s farm is gone. Only the silo’s headhouse remains above water.
The Atlantic refuses to rescind.
Hurricanes in February.
Killinger can climb no higher in the silo, but the water will. A community formed on Katahdin – the rescue boats begged him. The water will lower. He stayed.
The makeshift living space atop the silo had him thinking he could ride it out, but ever since Number 158 – naming storms ceased after the government disbanded – the ocean no longer ebbs. Most of his sheep drowned. Two ewes survived, but when floodwater turned silage to soup, one fled. Might’ve swam – he never saw her bobbing like the others, eyes picked clean by ravens.
The feed aerobic and putrid like rotten socks, he and the little ewe are starving.
Forty-six next spring. How many years does one deserve?
Killinger weeps as he creases the ewe’s neck with his hands. He strokes the fleece and thinks of kissing his son’s curly locks before lowering him into the grave.
Outside, a blanket of rust-colored algae hems the horizon to Katahdin. Killinger scans the distance for another family casket to sprout from the floodwaters’ muck. Caskets float, like prams; Katahdin’s too far to swim.
Clare circles the still waters of his dreams in her own oaken pram, eyes reflecting the same stars as the night he found her face-up tangled in barbed wire, the water flowing over her floral sundress as if in an eternal, ethereal sway.
A gust slashes at the silo. Another? The dead ewe is silent. With each storm, the water rises. He carves into the animal; its viscera fall to the sileage below. He cuts flanks into strips, twines them, hangs them from a rafter to dry. A breath of gnats appears. Killinger tosses the ewe’s head through the window and sees forgiveness in its slit pupils.
Clouds the weight of ire consume the setting sun. The wind screams southeast forcing troughs of rising water. The sky blinks, the silo yaws. Killinger holds his breath.
“You should have left when they said.” The pram porting Clare leaves a shimmering wake of lavender pedals.
“My Love, our whole family is buried here.”
He mourns his words. The bodies long gone. Where? Scraping the copper pebbles beneath the Penobscot? Isle Au Haut? Jericho?
The wind welts the silo and whitecaps fleck the horizon. Killinger’s skin crinkles with chills. The water engulfs his platform, tastes saline.
He should have let the ewe go.
Clare makes another pass. Her scent like the lavender that vined the lattice beneath their bedroom window.
“Three generations is a long time, Clare.”
“Someday, it will return.”
“I haven’t someday, My Love.”
The water rises, surrounds, comforts.
“Emmitt, take my hand.”
He surrenders.
“Killinger, you in there?”
The pram grazes the silo, Killinger sways beneath the flood.
“Emmitt, take my hand now.”
The wind howls hush. Clouds like bruises upon the night sky fade, leaving the stars to swim in a swirling sea of onyx until the horizon thins to nothing and earth and sky are one.
The black sea breaches the window, and Clare reaches through.
Her hand feels something like eternity.
Christopher Kostyn Passante is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Drexel University. He holds degrees from Clarion, Wesley, and Plattsburgh State universities. A former journalist and nonfiction author, he serves as a poetry editor for The Paper Dragon literary journal. He lives with his family in State College, Pennsylvania, where he draws inspiration from long walks among the Allegheny Mountains with Hiker and Sunshine, his wily Australian shepherds.
