Let The Water Rise
Father won’t let me leave. Fifty-seven years I’ve waited. Now, it smells like the waters will give me a ride out. It started to rain on Sunday. Father told me to see to the cows before church. I stood in the barn, and took in the cows’ soft eyes, the sandpapery, pink wetness of their plate-sized tongues, the clean warmth of their udders, the lightly acrid reek of the manure I would have to rake soon enough. I stood amongst the Holsteins. I knew I would always like cows, but I didn’t want to live with them anymore. We didn’t make it to church with the downpour.
The rain never stopped. Day and night. From Sunday to Tuesday, when even Father knew this was no ordinary storm, that the rivers were breaking their banks all over the valley, that this would change the landscape he thought he’d tamed. He thought he’d tamed the cows too, like he’d tamed me, once Mother died.
The sky opened and wouldn’t close. Cold rain on the fields, on the sheet metal of the barn, on the dusty windows of the house, on the gravel road to the highway, until the dirt road was only deep sludge that gripped the wheels of the truck and wouldn’t let go.
I told Father we had to leave. The radio was broadcasting appeals. We were all being told to pack up and evacuate. I told Father on Wednesday that was it, our chance to find just enough road before it sunk, and us with it.
Father kept saying the waters would fall. He kept talking about the Holsteins. I put a few things in the travel bag Mother gave me for the last summer camp I went to two months before she died. She stitched my name inside: Cornelius Webster. She never called me that though, just Cory. The bag is a throwback to the seventies, like everything else on the farm. Father never lets me change anything, except for the television that’s grown bigger each decade. It’s an eighty-six incher now.
Father won’t listen. I’ve been listening for fifty-seven years. I can’t listen any more. The waters will fall, given enough time. The farm will stand or it’ll drown. The world’s changing faster than Father’s oversized TV screens. The waters may fall but they’ll always rise again. I’ve to leave. It’s my chance, my time. I can smell the muddy flood waters. When they fall, then rise, I rethink my worry. I know I must go.
Véronique Béquin writes in southern Canada. She’s lived in France, and the UK. She’s been published in CV2, Sinister Wisdom, and IO Literary Journal among others. She’s been shortlisted for the Hippocrates poetry prize, the Bridport and the Wasafari Prize. She’s won the Alice Munro Short Story prize.