Сандрин Коллетт - Just After the Wave

She has been drifting for hours without even looking where she is going. Maybe she turned over, lying on the wooden floorboards which hurt her shoulder; maybe she crawled a few inches to put her head in the shade of the seat when the sun rose and began beating down. She can feel its burning rays on her clothes, the sweat of her body underneath.

She is already thirsty.

Never mind.

A faint, sour smell in her sweat attracts the flies. Madie is afraid. She wishes it were already over, that death had taken her, since that is what she has decided. But deciding wasn’t the hardest part: now she has to wait. This body that hasn’t wanted food for days, which can no longer stand this burden of woe, her body is still holding out. Let go, dammit , murmurs Madie, not opening her lips.

But it won’t.

The hot air burns her throat and sinuses—it’s not air, to be honest, it’s as if she were breathing above a pot of boiling water, she opens her mouth to let it into her lungs, the heat is stifling. Already a dozen times she has been tempted to wet her hair; a shudder, the time to get a hold of herself, no, no, now she just has to get it over with.

The sky is dropping down behind her closed lids, the light is fading. Madie doesn’t need to open her eyes, she can tell the clouds are gathering, doesn’t need to see to know a storm is brewing, because the wind has picked up a little, caressing her face, and the insects are buzzing around like crazy, after the skin on her face, and she no longer brushes them away. Much later, when she doesn’t know if this grayness is from the storm or the falling darkness, when she can no longer swallow because thirst is tearing her throat out, she can hear the rolling of thunder in the distance—it’s a storm, she remembers it so well. Just then, she feels a pang inside, because she would like to waste away, tranquil in her boat, as if she were simply falling asleep, but she has a premonition that it won’t be completely serene, but still—to die obstinately and slowly, that’s what she would like, on the water but not drowned, not caught in a whirlpool or a swell, or a storm. A tiny little ball of anger lodged deep in her guts is stirring, she thought it was gone for good, it makes her feel sick and she spits the bile overboard, she gulps, they’ve won, they have made her open her eyes—the gods, the devils, the bastards of this world. And it doesn’t make much difference, this opening her eyes, now that darkness has settled over the ocean. If there were land, if there were trees and houses, Madie would see shadows; but all the way to the horizon there is nothing, and the horizon stops where the darkness has engulfed it, just there, only a few yards away. The boat and the mother are rocking from side to side, back and forth, in the middle of the night. The boat doesn’t care, but the mother is clinging to the edge: already the wind has disheveled her, she knows the storm is on its way. She cannot tell where it’s coming from, or how strong it will be.

Just that it is coming.

For the first time, Madie is alone to confront it. A confrontation so unequal that she laughs—a single, dry little laugh, scornful, masking her terror, she looks like a madwoman with her sweat-soaked hair sticking to her forehead, her big eyes open wide and rolling in their sockets.

But an hour later she isn’t laughing, Madie, and she knows that in her entire life she has only ever seen this in books: a magnetic storm. She has watched it coming from far off. The sky torn by bolts of lightning, lines of molten fire plummeting into the waves, accompanied by deafening crackling sounds, it is as if the ocean itself were parting, swaths of phosphorescent green spreading across the surface and illuminating the lower depths, fathom upon fathom. Madie, leaning over the side, in silent stupor, cannot help but observe the drowned world below her when the lightning flashes, the dead outlines of the buildings and trees that were caught in the tidal wave, hulks of cars that haven’t had time to rust, illegible signs, turned and twisted. Asphalt streets blistered and split by the violence of the cataclysm; a church steeple. The storm makes them appear intermittently beneath the boat in a bleary yellow and green light, as if they were being photographed in negative, as if the harsh light of a projector was blinding them for a few fractions of a second, and after that, everything returns to obscurity, the mother leans a little further, terrified and tense with waiting, she wants to see more, to rediscover, to revel in this dead world caught in the currents, where everything floats and everything is trapped on the bottom, imprisoned by its own weight.

When a lightning bolt strikes thirty feet from the boat, Madie lies flat on the floorboards. She glances up at the clouds: now the storm is upon her, she can feel her small craft panicking, spinning on itself, the streaks from the sky circling it ever closer. At that moment exactly the mother thinks it is all over, yes, in that fraction of a second when the lightning strikes to her left, then again to her right, and the impact, the vibrations cause the waves to roar, aftershocks coming to ram the boat, and the green light with its charge of electricity stops a few inches from her, a cry, No! as she waits for the next flash to hit her, the water is riddled with lightning, a blinding glare, the end of the world.

On the boat Madie sobs among the lightning flashes, her hands over her ears, not to hear anymore; and then she puts them back on the side of the boat to hold on, instinctively, she cannot bring herself to surrender to the storm, to whirl her way down to those drowned lightning-lit landscapes.

She wanted to close her eyes, she couldn’t, it was as if they were being forced open to make her see, terror keeping them wide open, incredulous, awestruck, lashed by the spray that is making her weep, but there it is, it’s impossible to close her terrified, fascinated eyes, scorched by the lightning which continues to strike with a consuming rage, the bow of the boat is taking on water, Madie holds on, her mouth open in an endless scream.

And then a drop of rain.

She doesn’t even feel it.

Another one.

The storm hesitates, but she’s not looking.

Not screaming, nothing.

But not dead. Like those soldiers petrified by war who have forgotten how to move.

Her eyes riveted to the floor of the boat.

The storm abandons her just as dawn sketches a gray horizon. Then with no sense of relief, no prayer, Madie bails the water from the bottom of the boat and lies down again, her body drenched, her lips purple with cold and fright. She finds the same position, goes twelve hours back in time, an animal curled in a ball watching the night, then daybreak, out of the corner of its eye, the arrival of the sun, the heat causing steam to rise from her clothes and from the sea. The rowboat glides smoothly, lulled by peaceable currents.

The difference is hunger, thirst, and fear.

And death approaching, holding regrets by the arm.

On the ninth day after their parents left, Louie, Perrine, and Noah watched as the sea rose all day. Every hour, they went to inspect the water until it reached the stone Louie had put on the ground, covered it, and moved beyond it. Louie put a new stone a bit higher up, but Noah stopped him with his hand.

“I get it.”

The little boy added, as if to reassure himself—as if there was anything left to reassure him about—his eyes moist and his heart beating too fast:

“We have six days left, that’s it.”

Louie shrugged his shoulders, looking at the top of the hill.

More or less .

Perrine gazed at the ocean, her hand shielding her eyes. Pata has to get here.