Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

He pulled the shade, and as the sound outside quieted, there was a soft snap in the dark, then a few more in quick succession. He reached his hand out for hers, to where she’d been when he pulled the shade, and he felt the broken pieces of the last two candles drop through his fingers to the floor.

“Oh,” she said. “I do not know why I did that.”

But they both knew.

He stumbled closer to her and her footsteps padded away. They moved across the room, then went silent. Her breath, her smell, her heat remained. He led out with his arms, and without a word, with nothing but his sense of her, he made his way until her shoulder was against his hand, her fingers rippling through his hair, her lips at his chin, closing in on his mouth.

Later in that darkness, after they made love but before they fell asleep, he said, “When I was young, my uncle used to take me up in his plane and fly me out over the countryside. He only ever seemed happy up there. Sometimes with you, I feel like we’re that free. Like we will never come back down.” He tried not to think about the buildings falling, or her warnings that they should leave, or her husband on the other side of the city.

“Pavel and I were always stuck,” she said. “We were never good for each other. We were trapped in his art.”

He shivered, hearing what he’d been hoping to hear since he’d kissed her in the underground café, since she’d pushed him into her closet and he’d seen the ghost.

Katka woke with her leg in her mouth. The cut on her calf ached in her gums. She’d hoped sleep would heal her, seal the skin back together. Instead she felt the boot leather stuck to her wound. The blood had congealed. She’d dreamed of leaving Pavel in the house in Malešice. A large dog blocked her path. As it barked, it changed colors: black, red, green, yellow. It jumped at her throat. She dodged, and it flew past her and landed on Pavel. Suddenly she worried for Pavel’s life. She turned back, but the dog was licking his face. She felt the licking on her own face; her cheeks, her nose, melted into water.

Beside her, Tee slept peacefully on top of the sheets. She tried her boots on the floor — before she fell asleep, he’d asked about them, raising the eyebrow he said was from his father. But she saw that they turned him on.

She ground her teeth and lowered her right foot first, then carefully stepped onto her left. Sparks shot up to her hip, and she fell. She clutched the boot and lay on the floor, afraid that she’d woken him. It was too late to leave the apartment, and she didn’t want their time together to focus on injury. The cut was not why she’d left Pavel.

When she was sure she wouldn’t wake Tee, she limped to the bathroom, groggy with a hangover and the stabbing pain, much worse than before. At the bathroom door, her toes felt wet again. At first she panicked that she’d slept too long — but the floor was dry. The wound had reopened. She’d planted her foot, and the toilet paper must have torn away from her skin, ripping apart the blood clot.

She tried the sink. Nothing came out. She needed to wash the wound. She needed aspirin. Yet somehow the flood was the only water. She rechecked the medicine cabinet — still shockingly bare, still nothing to deserve her faith — then opened the shower curtain.

She poured blood from her boot as if a new ritual, to bleed out each day over her husband. She unwrapped the toilet paper. When she pressed a finger to the cut, something shifted under her skin. She clamped her teeth together. She squeezed the raised flesh beside the cut and covered her mouth to muffle the scream. A sliver of ceramic poked out, just barely, a hint of blue. It must have been working its way out as she slept — how deep it must have lodged. She shivered, her chest shuddered as she breathed, but she held her mouth with one hand, and with the other, she pinched the piece between her fingers and worked the ceramic free until it dropped into the tub.

She couldn’t wash the wound. Either she left off the boots and listened to Tee wonder aloud her thoughts — why hadn’t she told him before, before the flood got so high? — or she put the boot back on and kept her secret. She rewrapped the cut and wiped the boot dry before replacing it.

As she walked back, another building groaned. She caught the end of the collapse in the window: the roof wobbled as if trying to balance itself, like a drunk; then its bottom fell out and the river sucked the structure under. Slowly.

“You saw it,” he said, as if he sensed her in the hall.

She walked into the bedroom, trying to relax her jaw. The floodwater surrounded them, like an ocean around an oil rig, dirty and brown and awash with trash. She was dehydrated — in all this water. The rain had stopped. “It is okay,” she said, anticipating him.

“I’m sorry. More than I can say.”

She turned and went to the kitchen for the last couple beers she remembered were there. In front of the refrigerator, the tile was wet. A puddle spread over the whiteness to the toes of her boots. The flood had gotten into the apartment.

It took her a while before she realized the refrigerator was leaking, defrosted. Like with the blood in her boot.

He was behind her. “Just the fridge.” He took her in his arms, as afraid as she was. “The flood must be washing out the foundations.”

She nodded.

He swept one arm backward and into the wall. He shook his hand and they stared at the small dent.

“It doesn’t mean this building will fall,” he said.

She returned to the bedroom, slowly, to hide the pain, and dressed. He stared at her boots, conspicuous until she was fully clothed. Then he dressed, too. He opened and closed his hand. The red flat of his palm.

When their building didn’t collapse after an hour, or a half hour, or fifteen minutes, a long short time, she took off her wedding ring, which she hadn’t done before, and left it on the chest of drawers where the Golem had sat. She wished she hadn’t slept on the same side of the bed as always.

“You said potopa before,” Tee said. “What does that mean? Flood?”

She sat on the bed and forced a smile. “I have already told you it is okay. I have already said it is not your fault.”

“My aunt tried to jump from the roof the day I got to America,” he said, arcing one finger like a diver. “I think she must have known about me. My mother—”

Finally she interrupted him. “Stop it!” she said. “That is enough. Do you see your family here?”

He looked at her in shock. She bit a little flake of skin off her lip until it bled. He opened his mouth to speak, and she said, “If you say you are sorry one more time, I will hate you.”

They ate sandwiches again for breakfast, and when they took their dishes back to the kitchen, the flood was there, at last. The water had crept over the linoleum, along the molding in the hall, under the apartment door and across the uneven hardwood. The floor was not flat — Tee had only begun to live on his own.

She pulled him into the kitchen, heaped the peanut butter and jelly and remaining bread into his arms, and nudged him back into the hall, ahead of her. In the bedroom, she pushed him onto the bed. His legs strong from walking all over the city. If the water rose above the mattress, they wouldn’t have any choice but to swim. She clambered up beside him. She imagined people in the falling buildings, holding their noses until the magic of survival ran out. Her cheeks rusted. “Do you love me?” she asked suddenly, keeping her fingers from her calf. “Because you had better love me.”

When the flood was halfway up the bed, another building fell. Tee got down off the mattress and splashed through the water, his bare calves in the brown river in the bedroom. As he danced through the debris, she smiled that he was still the kid in his boxers in Old Town, the fireworks exploding around him, his black hair flashing like flint under the sparks.