Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery

Author:Brian Francis Slattery
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Science Fiction, Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780765329127
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-04-10T07:00:00+00:00

The River

NORTH OF MILLERSBURG THE Susquehanna got wild. The water thick and slow. Islands rippling with dense trees, birds of prey skulking in the leaves. The calls and roars of monkeys. The half-submerged columns of a long-gone trestle bridge, stone and crumbling mortar, shaggy crowns of small trees. A dead bass, bloated and bleaching, bumped against the Carthage’s hull. In the hills and on the shore, shambling flooded farms. Houses with plywood walls and tin roofs melting into the water. A dock made of tires, a bright blue fan boat tied to a tree with dirty yellow rope. A dented gas can with a hole in the top, floating on its side, pouring greasy rainbows into the current. As if everyone had left without much of a hurry, stood outside their houses while the water rose and the sky churned to the north of them. They took a good long look. Understood that material goods didn’t mean much. The blue couch in the living room, the Formica table. A kitchen full of particleboard shelves. Grandmother had made the purple pillows on the bed, but Grandmother was gone now, never sentimental when she was here, and alive in their heads besides. Those three kids in the car, hitting each other, pressing their hands into the condensation on the windows, were all that mattered.

Faisal Jenkins, the pilot, saw the rain in the water before he felt it in the air. It was a scout for the Big One, and the river was rising with it, pushing harder. The channel broadening and deepening. Soon there would be debris from upstream. A tangle of branches, broken trunks, roots grasping for ground. A signpost. Clothes. Maybe bodies, some poor people facedown, arms out. Faisal Jenkins had talked about it once with another pilot, before the war came to Harrisburg. The other pilot sitting on the floor of the bar, back against the wall, spitting out the husks of seeds.

“You know all those dikes,” he said, “in Binghamton, in Scranton? Wilkes-Barre? All those towns walling in the river? I think this is the year the river breaks them all. It will put us under six, seven feet of water, and stay that way until we stop thinking of going back. Do you hear what I’m saying?” A glare in his eye. “It wants revenge.”

“Revenge for what?” Faisal Jenkins said. The other pilot squinted. Spat out another seed.

“For what?” he said. “Where do I start?”

Judge Spleen Smiley was sitting on the deck at the bow, his back to the north, picking out some Delmore Brothers on a tenor guitar, that old freight train moving along to Nashville. The clouds were scudding down the valley behind him, a wall of rain.

“Hey,” Faisal Jenkins said. “Hey! Get under here. Big piece of weather in about two minutes.” He pointed and Judge Spleen Smiley turned, gave a low whistle. But nothing could rush him. He put the guitar in its case. Closed all four latches. Ambled up to the pilothouse just as the rain swept the water in front of them.

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