With stumblestagger and hoary curse. With brainreeling and loud yelling. Head hits pavement, hollow clanging pain, up again and fucking hole in the sidewalk fucking ill-fitting ill-mannered shoe trrrrripping him up. Rrrrrriping him up knees. Loud slapping irritable shoes. Down again. Stay down. Hat hits ground, wool hat the brrright rred color of stop. light. Color of police. light. Beacon. Pouring good bourbon on the shining rain-slick street. Eyes on him. Doors locking and shades drawn all down the street. 

The thoughts that goes through a man’s head, now, are not quiet thoughts. They don’t have  gentle voices. They do not stutterslow. Rawkus laugh and on down the wetslick3am street. 

At the turning of the corner he stands and shakes himself. And he goes hands in whistling pockets clear headed to the river.

*

Across the swaying plank bridge to the small island with steady step. He sits in the silty soil, dampness crawling into his trousers, and all around him the rising river is wine dark and seething with sea serpents. The sky swells with a strange heavy rosy glow in a great arc across the water, but there is no moon, there are no stars. It’s a storm light. Dark clouds gathering in the weeds and dusky branches on the edges of the river, moving with the water, flashes of light fighting their way through. The damp sweet river smell, the damp dead leaves, the damp smooth rocks, the spiders crawling through the holes in his shoes, washed away by the incoming, ever-rising river tide. 

The unexpected fireflies trip him up. Rip open the holes in his head. Why are they here, now, in this doomy place at this doomy time? Why are they making him remember.

The smell of rain washes over him, clings to his wet skin, fills in the holes in his head. The river smell becomes the rain smell, and the rain comes, as it always does, expected but surprising, changing everything, light balance mood thoughts. It comes in dark bright shimmering sheets and waves, cold even on a hot day. And now he has to move or he’ll be stuck here because the water will rise, the island will be covered, soon, will be mostly gone, and there will be no exit. Huis clos.

He hangs the hat, sodden but bright still, on a branch that will rise above the water, wedging it with practical, tactical care. He hangs his shit shoes nearby, tying them round and round and round again by the filthy laces. He takes another pair out of his bag and ties them up tight on his feet for the running. The fireflies are gone, but the lightning gashes across the sky, causing electric tingling terror on his skin, though he says that he doesn’t care. He don’t care. He don’t care.

Off into the trees then, on the roller coaster root rotten ridden ride through the island to the other side. Past the dark gaping building and its haunted outhouses, its crippling memory mildew smell, past the past-flood strewn barrels and mattresses and tangled iron skeleton castaways. 

*

[Close your eyes, child, and try to run this. Midsummer, sweetswagger hush. Flower sweet air. Twilight light woodthrushes calling but nobody watching. Eyes tight closed, feet remember feet remember. Up down down up, root here, branch there. Flat on face, nose bleeding, forehead raw sore. Stupid boy. Try again another day. Home to grandma mad-worried. More blood. Blood on blood on blood on blood again.]

*

Wide eyes open, now, though his feet remember. The rain drops dlop dlop dlop loud on the roof of leaves like it always has, coming in a rush then a silence then a rush, and the lightening starkens the bark on the trees and the tangles of weeds. He is a man underwater, swimming swimming alongside the giant creatures, clutching at their fins as they disappear into the murkiness beyond him. Up and down, root here, branch there, tangle of river-strewn garbage everywhere. At the garden he stops, the garden in the middle of the island surrounded by stakes and wire covered over by vines and fruits and life. 

The hush here is so loud, the rain and lightning so far up, so distant, so removed, in this garden in the middle of nowhere, tended by nobody he has ever seen. All the fireflies of the island are here, now, speaking to him in bright bursts. The garden speaks to him in hushed petals voices and leaves voices, asking him to stay to stay to stay. He’s lived here for full weeks some summers, when things got bad at home, pilfering vegetables, sneaking into town for the things people left behind. Sleeping under a lean-to of leaning rotting wood. 

And now it tells him in its familiar rainwashed bright green voice, you could stay here forever. Forever. In this strange still light. With the memories. And the sharp green smells, and the rain. He shakes himself, like a dog, head to tail, and he leaves. He laughs and he leaves. 

To stay on this island tonight is suicide. To stay in this town is slow disillusionment. 

He can cross the island long to long in under 10 at a run, he’s timed himself. Again and again and again. But the memories keep tripping him up. And he will die here, if he stops here, under the murky water, in the waving weeds, watched by the speaking fishes, as he has dreamed so many times.

On he runs, slipping up and down the slopes in the rain-slick mud. The hollows of the hills are filled with water now, rising rising. The river is licking at the shore. His feet are soaked through, and then his ankles, his calves, swallowed by the snaking water. 

Tomorrow, he thinks, will be a perfect day. The sky will be blue and high, the air light and sweet. People will gather at the banks of the river and speak in hushed water-reverential voices, watching as the water level rises and rises though the rain has long stopped. People will stand tsktsktsking and looking on with secret satisfaction as other peoples’ yards fill with water, other peoples’ memories are drowned in the rank stinking muddy flood water. Warped, rotted, blistered. So sad so sad, they will say, and wish it was just a little worse. A little more memorably awful.

In a dark hollow in the trees the broad pale ghostly wings of a hawk rise, causing the usual unrest. All around him bird’s wings like small fluttering hearts fill his ears, but it’s only the rain, again and again. The water up to his knees, now, his sodden pants dragging him to the earth, dragging him stumbling downwards. 

The island is narrower here and he catches glimpses of the river itself rising through the trees, covering over their roots and their low branches, turning them blacker than the moody night. He can hear the river noisy rushing, and the path winds and narrows and then he stops. In a flash he sees the dark stark scaffolding of a treehouse with the river water lapping hungrily against its shaggy make-shift legs. The memories flood his eyes till he can’t see. 

*

Small branches and thorns prickling his bare legs where he sits hidden in the thickety shadows, watching the light from the older boys’ cigarettes slowly glow and fade, glow and fade. The light from their fire warms him like no other. The smoke from it smells better to him than almost anything on earth. He loves them, these boys. They know he’s there, watching, but they don’t care. They laugh and talk and push each other into the dark water and dry off by the fire and drink beer and god knows what else they throw things into the fire, they cook strange food they burn it everytime and they laugh. They read Yeats, he doesn’t know why, but they do. They found a book on the shore, maybe, or in the ashes.

There’s one boy he loves even more than the smoke from the fire. Bright pink close-cropped hair, like the sun, he looks like the sun. Quick-slow rough grace – easy swagger. He would talk to him and give him things. Sandwiches, bottles of soda, the hoodie off his back. Once, when he had slept on the island for a few nights, a blanket, an old pillow. Sam, the boy called him. Sam, which was not his name. Everyone knew him in this small city, everyone knew what his life was like. Everyone told stories. Calling him Sam was the kindest gift of all. 

And once he gave him Yeats. He left the scorched and tattered book wrapped in a t-shirt and what a strange and mysterious gift. How he pored over it, wearing the too-large t-shirt, sitting by the ashes of the big boys’ fire, turning the pages with dirty fingers. In the dawning light, trying to make sense of the words he could barely read. It made no sense at all. It’s never made sense, but he carried it with him always singing in his head. I will arise and go now. I will arise and go now.

The boys are all gone, for years now. One fall they all left with the birds. He looked for them around town, but they weren’t there. He would pass by the treehouse all hours like a lonely ghost, but they didn’t come back. And it splintered and fell apart, and people came and painted on the trees. The boys would never paint on the trees. He sat on the rotting structure and cried into his hands, he could smell the salt dirt and feel it on his skin. He could feel the loss. 

*

“Sam.” 

A jolt of prickling icy fear. Confusion.

“Your name is Sam, right?”

He doesn’t know this person, how does he know this person? “No. I’m not Sam.”

She shrugs. “Okay.” She seems grey. Grey skin, dirty grey sweatshirt, blonde hair so pale it looks grey falling in limp wisps around her face. Sharp grey eyes. Her hands are quick and scarred and angular, her arms wiry and scratched. She smells grey, like old cigarettes and weak coffee and the neongrey wash of fluorescent lights. She runs his items over the scanner and sets them in a careful pile on the other side, stopping for a moment to consider each one.

“Take me with you.”

“What? Where?”

“You’re stocking up for a trip. Take me, too. The light in this place is so bad.” Her voice is strangely soft, warm. The softest thing about her and familiar somehow.

“I’m not. I’m not going anywhere. It’s not for me.”

“Okay.” She shrugs and wipes her nose with the back of her skinny hand and scratches her raw red neck. “You want some liquor? I know you’re not old enough, but I’ll give you some, for the journey.” 

“No. I don’t drink.”

“For your grandmother.”

“She died.”

“I know. I know. I heard she left you her debts and her dog. Big debts, big dog.”

How does this person know him? He’s miles away from town. How does she know. “No. That’s not me. You’re thinking of someone else.”

“Okay.” She laughs, and her whole body crumples as she clutches her stomach for a second. “I was just joking. I wouldn’t go with you if you begged me. Jeeze.” She looks up at him with dark sky cloudy eyes. “I want to give you something. It’s a photograph. Of the first big flood. With the light at close of day, water rising, boys with vivid faces on the island. Laughing with fear. I want to give you that photograph.” She bends over and covers her face with her hands and then knuckles into her eyes. She shakes her fingers at him and laughs a jagged laugh. “Yours now.” 

The windows are piled with cans of beans and toilet paper and cleaning products, but he can just see the charcoal sky, painted with shades of dark and darker grey. He needs to leave now. He has a plan, he has it timed to the rain and the river. 

“Paper or plastic?”

He shoves everything into his backpack, in a madman hurry. He stops. He takes out Yeats, he leaves him for her on the counter. 

*

The river is up to his thighs now, in waves, freezing and prickling though his face is covered in sweat and rain and tears. He’s not far enough along. He can barely run now, and he holds his backpack over his head to keep it out of the hungry water. 

*

The dog. The fucking dog. On his side laying on the lawn dry burnt grass storm coming like so many times before. Smell of the dry dust and fear. Askew view. Planes flying out of sight at a strange angle, going places he would never go, leaving a trail that wouldn’t last in the strange staring sky. Broken swingset nobody played on, tires and wires and everything rusted. Wiry dog, skinny, tall, foul-tempered, with a chain cutting into her neck just like his own. Growling and howling. Sad to lose to lose to lose the person who had always been cruel. Dogs are like that. Howling in pain and loss. Dogs are like that. 

The dog growls and snarls like she always did. They never got along. Too much alike. Scars on his hands and arms to prove it.

Well, he can’t take her with him and he can’t stay for a dog. But he can’t leave her like this. He walks over to her calmly though her nose is furrowed and her fangs are bared. He don’t care. He don’t care. Fur stands on end, eyes angry. Snapping. He reaches his hands on either side of her face, and he doesn’t know what she’ll do. He gently holds the chain around her neck, and he doesn’t know what she’ll do. He pulls the chain over her ears, and she’s free, but he doesn’t know what she’ll do. 

She stops, suddenly still. Storm brewing. Heavy air. She makes no noise. There’s a strand of slobber from her lips gently swaying, as she turns her head to the house. Back to him. Then she scratches at the chain furrow in her neck. She lies and licks her scarred paws. She stands and walks to him, she smells like a rain dog, though the rain is still far off. She bends and presses her face against his chest. The pressure is not much, but it’s too much and his heart stops and he can’t breathe. 

She sits on her bony heels and sighs and blinks at him with her murky green grey eyes like water after a storm. He has to go he has to go. Arise and go now. The dog lays down with her head on her paws, her eyes following him as he moves about the yard. He slashes the belly of a bag of kibble and the innards spill into the scorched grass. He fills a chipped mixing bowl with water, though the rain will fill it over and over soon enough. He leaves the back door open, because there’s nothing left to steal. 

The shed smells like gasoline, yellow newspapers, and fear. It’s hard to move in here. Everything is sharp, tangled, moldy. Grasping to his legs and winding him up. Scratching his arms and catching in his clothes with needy clinging claws. The nightmare smell of nights locked in this place, rats scuttling in the floorboards and the dog scratching at the door, yelling from the house. Dark dark dark. In the spidery splintered hole in the plywood he finds the wad of bills and the good bourbon. Tucked into his bag with his grandfather’s bright. Red. Cap. 

He doesn’t know if she’ll follow him out of the yard. He doesn’t know if she’ll go into the house when the storm comes. But he doesn’t have time to worry about that now and he runs and doesn’t look back. He don’t look back. 

* 

He’s close to the end now, and in the hollows the water reaches to his waist. He’s not really thinking anymore, he’s not feeling. He’s rain numb. Just moving his feet in the water and the mud as he’s always done. If this is really the end he don’t care he don’t care. He’s always treading water. His whole life just moving his legs and quietly flailing his arms and staying afloat then sinking. To rise and fall and rise and fall again. Dream depths of watery darkness below strangely inviting. The sky above always swollen and moody, always a storm darkness on the edges up ahead. 

One last deep trench in the path, and then the rising creek that cuts this island off from land,  that makes it an island. The water is higher than he expected, here. He’s taken too long. 

The water is wide and the fierce force of the current carries shit from upriver, snaking through the trees, carrying branches and garbage lifted from drowning yards. Chairs and toys and everything sharp and hard and filthy. A teeming river of trash, his element. He takes a step forward and slides through the mud towards the water, digging his heels in. Maybe he’ll lay down here for a while. Should. he. do. that? He can think of no earthly reason not to. After all, it’s very quiet here, with just the falling of the rain and the rushing of the dirty water. 

The fucking dog. Otherworldly now, shining strangely across the water in a light that is not there. And why is she here, now? How how? It makes no sense at all. So far from home. She’s soaked through, shivering, terrified of the lightning, shaking with every strike. But she’s fiercely frantically barking. She rushes to the edge of the water, snapping at it like she would eat it alive, swallow it whole. She’s yelling at him. With an angry tender vicious hurt wounded lifetime of pain. Howling mad. Will they go down together? How stupid to go down together. 

With a huge hollow sigh, he spins and flings his backpack across the water. Will it make it? He don’t care. The dog noses it where it lands in a sodden thicket of ferns, and he regrets the lack of food for her, though he doesn’t know why. And then he steps into the water. The water pulls at him with the devastating strength of garbage and memories and regrets and he’s knocked hard by everything it’s carrying with it. Everything he’s carrying with him. He’s knocked under and the dirty water fills his mouth and his ears and his eyes. If this is the end he don’t care. But his arms care, apparently, because they’re grasping wildly in front of him, and they find roots and submerged shrubs and they grab hold for life, for dear life. He drags himself though the mudbound mermaids from each to each, pulling himself towards the sound of barking and howling, which he hears at each strange break above the surface, each strange moment when he doesn’t know if he belongs above or below.

Sam drags himself out of the water to the frantic attentions of the dog. He vomits filthy water on the bank and lies for a spell with just the water licking at his feet and the dog licking warm whiskery and worried at his ears. Just the sound of the rain, slowing, quieting, and the rumble of thunder, ringing warm and soft as it travels down the valley. Sam just lies here for a moment in the mud and the rain and the sweet swampy grass. Not thinking. Then he and the dog pull pull themselves from the earth and shake themselves off, head to tail. They scramble up the steep scabby bank to the field where the towering metal structure hums with electrical wires. The shrubs and brambles are painful here, slicing your skin, clinging to your clothes. He’ll find dry lobsterclaws, here and there, for weeks to come. 

One small stretch of traintrack, and he’s runningwalking, soaked clothes pulling him down. Trying to hurry but why would he hurry, now. He’s trying not to think about the dog, trying not to worry if she’s keeping up. But she is, trotting next to him, looking up at him with a scared, devastating, confiding face.

They walk along the small highway for a while, splashing bedraggled down the road. Sam wants to make some space. Some distance. But he’s so tired. So tired. 

Sam and the dog sleep under a highway bridge with the spiders and the pigeons. Up the steep slope in the dusty crawlspace on top of the abutment. Head on backpack, everything soaked through, curled with the dog leaning against him. With the weird weight of the scrawny stinking dog pressed against him, shivering. She’s dreaming with her nose in his hoodie pocket, twitching. Just the sound of the rain on the bridge above and on the wet streets stretching away, the sound of the rain softly slowing, and of the river slowly rising. Just the calm curious cooing of the pigeons, staring at him with surprised eyes, asking him questions he doesn’t need to answer, and the gentle urgent whimpering of the dreaming dog. Just all of this. He doesn’t sleep all night, but he dreams of small birds, small wildly beating hearts, flying away into the night sky.

*

The next morning dawns a perfect day. The sky is blue and high, the air light and sweet. People gather at the banks of the river and speak in hushed voices, watching as the water level rises and rises though the rain has long stopped. The water has washed over the island, leaving only the crooked top of the house and the surprised upper branches of small trees, reaching stark and awkward out of the swiftly moving filth-filled water, teeming with trash. But the bright red cap of sodden wool and the shit shoes are there still, tightly tied to the bobbing branches. On dry land across the water, everyone says tsk tsk tsk. These people, they say. It was inevitable, all along. Of course, he would come to a bad end. The water is too rough to search for bodies, and what would be the point? Who would be there to receive it? Who would be there to mourn him?

*

Later in the day, miles up the river, far down the highways, Sam leaves the dog at the door of a small grocery store. He buys some food, some water. He buys a leash and a collar. When she greets him outside, he gives her a name.