Floods
The floods came. They overturned cars. They swept away family pets and picket fences. They invaded homes through seams and gaps. They washed away time itself, picking telephone poles from the loose soil and depositing them further downstream, wires and bits of wood washing up onto school yards and parking lots abandoned and quiet.
Then the rain stopped and we all came out of our homes, dirty and hungry from days without power. We walked to neighboring houses to see if they had eaten their children yet, covered in blood and in the dark, hiding from their own reflections. The children were alive but missing limbs, charred skin festering and leaking pus.
The winds came. They tossed branches and loose shingles. They whipped at our hair and our clothes and we went to the banks of the river, hoping it would soon rise again and take us away from the slitted eyes of the walls that watched us weep and reduce to nothing but ash in the midst of the raging fire within our own minds.
The river was still at our doorstep but we walked to where the crowds had gathered. Adolescent girls wearing hardly anything skipped along concrete banks flaunting their skin and begging with their eyes. Begging to be treated like the abandoned homes that lay gutted and violated by the fingers of the wind and the rain and the floods.
The fires came. They licked the edges of the forest as we clambered down our tiny rope ladders, placing trust in manufacturers capitalizing on all the children that had been taken by flames remembered only in the outdated print on newspapers stored within the cellars of the elderly. They gave us something to watch from the comfort of our own upstairs windows, binoculars sitting gingerly upon the dark circles that had settled under our eyes, rifles locked and loaded resting on the coffee table littered with empty jugs and ash trays full of vanities.
We pray for natural disasters. It gives us a reason to act like the animals we know we are. Depravity knows no bounds when the wind howls and races in our ears. We purposely let the batteries in our flashlights run dry so when the lights finally go out, we don’t have to look at ourselves in the mirror.
