by Dr Reed Levine, Los Angeles, CA, USA
What transpires when an immovable object is confronted with an unstoppable force?
I returned home to find things oddly unchanged from what my memories told me. Even with water everywhere, it more or less looked the same, only greener. Floating above the house, looking down, it looked just like it had on Google Earth when I had last looked about 40 years back. Our house, unlike every other one for miles in any direction, was unique.
Prior to my family taking ownership, it had been the homestead of the man who was responsible for building 90% or so of all the other houses in the neighborhood. Those other houses were all from one of five cookie-cutter models. Over the years, various owners had made renovations and updates but behind the make-up was that same old face. As a child, it was bizarre going to various friends’ homes and discovering they all lived in the same home with different furniture and wallpaper. I could go to anyone’s house and know where the bathroom was or how big the closet in their sister’s bedroom was. How many stairs led to the basement…
My home though was different. It was a brick box, supposedly built for free courtesy of all the people the man who used to live there hired. You want the contract to supply copper wire to four hundred homes? Wire my home for free. Want to sell us the cement for this entire neighborhood? Lay my foundation gratis. And so on.
So it was a flat-roofed brick home I now floated idly above. Living on the shore Long Island, we had periodically heard of the threat of erosion slowly eating away at our property. The true end came much faster.
It had taken roughly eight months for the water to rise from doorstep to rooftop. Now it was deep enough that a motorboat could cruise over the roof without threat of damage to their submerged prop. A horseshoe crab scuttled menacingly through a broken window. Jellyfish in my kitchen, shrimp swarming in my parent’s bedroom.
Down there I once ate breakfast in an innocent warm summer sun, lost my first tooth, planted peas and smiled when their sweet pods swelled, vanished into comic books, played angsty drums after returning from high school, got splinters in my feet every summer running barefoot on the deck. I don’t have the heart to dive down and swim through my old bedroom. Instead I swim back up and surface. I climb back into the worn boat I chartered a mere 12 minutes after diving off.
“Back so soon”, the pilot asks, looking at his watch, “the boat is still yours for another hour and a half.”
“Take me home,” I exhale, my face dripping with a saline wetness that well conceals my tears.
What I say next is lost under the roar of the outboard’s motor as we turn and begin the long ride back to the mainland.
6 comments:
i dug this, but i think maybe another 80-120 wds could be used in this one to describe what's happening *around the main character, the only image in my mind was him floating above/inside an old house. give me street names or something, a few cityblocks of setting
Did you swim past the Hannukah house? This story is so descriptive that I feel like I know where you are describing, exactly!
hmmmm... this is an interesting story, but it lacks one major ingredient of all excellent stories...it lacks a clear description of the house number as well as the warnings of the "mother-figure" who would have warned the protagonist about the dangers of swimming near an unlit house!!!!!(not to mention the question of whether or not the toaster oven was unplugged....you could get a shock!)
Quality in the guise of brevity.
I personally think that the lack of identifying markers really drives home (no pun intended) the fact that submersion paints a coat of fateful loss to the depths. It's as if the streets don't matter now...it's all gone.
i'm feelin it! a nice subtle story.
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