Wait Softly Brother by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Author:Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buckrider Books
Published: 2023-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Day Sixteen

It’s after midnight when I finish writing. It’s not exhaustion that stops me but a whine I hear from my parents’ bedroom. I tiptoe to their door and it’s quiet. I hold my breath for a few seconds, listening, and there it is again, a strange plaintive cry. My mum, dreaming or wincing in her sleep. I turn the knob and, as quietly as possible, go to her.

“Mum,” I whisper. “Mum.” When she stirs, I ask her if she needs to go to the hospital. I am still dressed, wide awake, and can easily get her there.

“Is it still raining?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m fine.”

“You were making this strange noise.”

“Your father says I do that, too. I have no idea.”

“Like a kind of sorrowful call.”

“I’m fine. Go to sleep. I’m fine. Really.”

I sit there for a bit until I am sure she is back asleep. Then I go to my room, power down my laptop and try to sleep. There has been so much rain that now the sump pump is running continuously. I hear it engage, the gurgle of water moving. I don’t think Dad has been down there in a few days. It occurs to me that someone better check it just to make sure we aren’t flooding.

The lights flicker and stay on. I go down with my boots on, which is a good thing because the floor is muck. It’s looking like if the rain doesn’t stop, the basement will soon be underwater. It’s groundwater from farther north. The streams and lakes are engorged and the groundwater keeps rising. I heave a few Tupperware bins off the wet floor and onto a shelf and stack some cardboard boxes on top of them.

Wet has entirely seeped into the walls – they are dripping, and the smell of fetid animal is strong again. I suppose there are any number of mouse and rat and chipmunk families scrambling for their lives in this weather. But this odour seems too big for a rodent’s death. It’s overwhelming. I pull an old Singer sewing machine out from behind a paint-chipped table. I yank a boiled wool coat from where it’s wedged on the floor between a couple of old chests. It’s moth-eaten and mouldy, and it looks like something circa 1920 or so – a women’s coat, purple, with big buttons and a bit of flair at the bottom. I wonder which ancestor wore it.

Stupid to have left it down here. I’m getting deeper into the hoard at this point, closer to the walls since I started weeks ago, more or less, in the middle of the room, working out in all directions. I’ve hauled quite a lot upstairs by now, too, and set it in a pile for when we can get a bin delivered. Behind the coat, which I have placed on the stairs to bring up, is a stash of shoeboxes filled with documents, photographs, stamps, old passports – all of it ruined by damp. The ink is cloudy and unreadable and the photographs are rotted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.