The Floating World: A Novel by Babst C. Morgan

Author:Babst, C. Morgan [Babst, C. Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

One Day after Landfall

August 30

On Martin Luther King, they stopped the Jeep and got out into the early morning damp. Up ahead, in front of Calliope, a tree had fallen, a tangle of power lines and rough-barked limbs frozen at tortured angles. Two men in wifebeaters stood on the corner, leaning against the chain-link, and Cora glanced back at the Jeep and the pirogue they’d stolen from the Maestres’ garage strapped to the top of it. They would have to walk from here.

Last night, Cora had kept dreaming the same dream. She was floating in the middle of a river as wide as an ocean, watching the muddy banks. A wind stirred, and dead oak leaves eddied towards the water in a tumbling gust that changed into a murmuration of clamoring birds. She woke, fell back asleep, and the beach was there again, but this time the birds had transformed into a horde of people rushing towards the waves. Men and women, little boys and girls in Carnival clothes and masks reached out their hands to her, but she stood paralyzed in the prow of her rudderless boat, and every tear that fell from her face made the flood rise higher.

She didn’t need Dr. Nemetz to explain that one.

After the last dream, she’d rolled over on the mattress and taken Troy’s phone from his nightstand, found Reyna’s number in his recents, pressed send an uncountable number of times, listening to the alarm sound of the failed phone line as she drifted off again. Half-asleep, she felt a hot pressure in her lungs as if she were diving under water, her webbed feet pushing her towards the muddy riverbed, her feathers pressed to her sides. She needed to find something before she could rise again, surface with it held in her beak. A faceless woman and her children climbed out of the water through the hole they’d chopped in their roof with an enormous axe, but then they fell, floating limply towards the riverbed, facedown.

When she finally elbowed Troy to wake him, he just rolled over, growling. She’d come close to hyperventilating, waiting for the dawn. Breathe through your nose, deep down. Think about the task in pieces: what’s your first step?

So far, they hadn’t seen the water. All through the Quarter and down Tchoupitoulas, Annunciation, Melpomene, she’d had to maneuver the Jeep around branches and torn wires that basked like snakes on the asphalt, but the streets had been dry. Even here in Central City there was no water, but the men at the chain-link still looked at the pirogue, the Jeep, with desire. Troy nodded at the men. One nodded back. The other, a bandana tied tightly around his head, just threaded his fingers through the links of the fence and kept looking.

Between the brick buildings, the grass was spongy with rain. The paths that led up to the doorways had been broken up in places by weeds, and devil vine reached up towards the railings on the porches. Two women sat on a stoop, fanning themselves with magazines.

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