Swallow by A.M. Holly

Author:A.M. Holly [Holly, A.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-07-15T22:00:00+00:00

FOUR YEARS AGO

When I was twenty-five, the hurricanes returned. They’d been there throughout my entire life, of course, and there were a few that hit the mainland every wet season. The government would shut down, dry areas would flood, low ground turned to rivers, roads washed out and disappeared. Families and neighbors went out in canoes and bamboo rafts and searched for the missing and sometimes found them. When the waters receded, civil engineers would come out and prison laborers would rebuild the roads. But there had not been a hurricane superseason in recent history until the summer I was twenty-five.

That period of quiet over so many wet seasons left us unprepared that year. Storms lined up off the coast of Africa, in the Gulf, and in the Caribbean, and spun toward us in regular succession, an automatic weapon of nature. Every week another storm came until it seemed like they would never stop and the peninsula would never dry again, like the sea was determined to bury us in water.

Most of the storms I saw from my apartment window and heard in the shaking of the walls and moaning of the wind. A few buildings on base were evacuated in favor of stronger ones away from the water, but most of them were ready to withstand the worst of what the ocean could hurl in our direction. Odessa was on lockdown and everyone was ordered to stay at their permanent address so building managers could account for them. Palm trees in the median bent like blades of grass and fronds came loose and disappeared; a road sign sailed through the air like a thrown spear. Waves rolled and flowed over the street that was now indistinguishable from the ocean. The sea was everywhere and its plastic debris thrown like dull confetti, obscuring most of what I could have seen otherwise in the darkness of a day with no sun and no sky.

I thought about the communities of factory workers waiting inside the factories until the storm passed, the field workers waiting in the packing houses as the storm ravaged the landscape. I did not know if they were taking shelter in those buildings, but I hoped they were.

At times pilots were sent to get ahead of the weather and transport aircraft from Odessa to an air base in the Middle West for safe storage and wait out the storm there. At times Hurshing the president sent troops across the ruined peninsula to the south and to the Gulf coast to turn away foreign aid ships offering water purification kits, food, tents, and first aid. At times pilots were sent into rural counties to keep order, to deliver supplies that were never enough. To distribute chloroquine and chlorguanide tablets for malaria and nothing for the rot that settled in the feet and legs when they were wet for too long. To show that the government was still in control and to say Hurshing the president and Hurshing the governor were repairing the damage and to be grateful and wait patiently.

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