After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

People called the years the coasts disappeared the Hundred Year Flood. The Hundred Year Flood didn’t last exactly a hundred years, because no one knew for sure exactly when it began. Unlike a war it had no call to arms, no date by which we could remember its beginning. But it lasted close to a hundred years, a little longer than a person’s lifetime, because my grandfather always said that when his mother was born New Orleans existed and when she died it did not.

Communication was breaking down by that point, the whole world reduced to a rumor, and I stopped listening.

I hadn’t realized how much I lived to give my child the things I valued. How my own enjoyment of them had grown dull with age.

Sometimes those people were one and the same, the wealthy who grew wealthier in disaster, able to turn catastrophe to their advantage.

I knew it was sometimes easier to love ghosts than the people who were around you. Ghosts could be perfect, frozen beyond time, beyond reality, the crystal form they’d never been before, the person you needed them to be.

I hadn’t allowed myself to have a dream in so long it felt foreign, uncomfortable, like a muscle gone weak.

The sun shone against my eyelids and I saw only red, my body aflame as though I’d swallowed fire. The whole world became a howl.

I married him because I thought he was so taken with me that he’d never leave me.

Pearl clasped my hand so hard, pain shot up through my arm. My love for her burned brighter, a dazzling clarity, a part of me that couldn’t be touched.