Above Flood Stage

Helen and Betty are not asleep in the attic. They are listening to the rain. They are listening to the rushing sound of water and it is keeping them up. They are two little girls, sisters—Helen is six and Betty is eight—and they cannot sleep because of the persistent rushing sound of so much water. It angrily punches the wooden beams, clawing for the insulation underneath. The drops want to shatter like bullets through the roof and shower over the girls’ heads. The water washes down the one window at the far end of the attic and reminds Betty of an advertisement for a frontloading washing machine that she once saw on television. The only thing that’s missing is a rainbow assortment of baseball jerseys to tumble, in simulation, over and over past the window as well. Betty is eight years old and she doesn’t expect a rainbow assortment of baseball jerseys to go tumbling past the window in the attic, but maybe. The power is out. It is night and when the lightning flashes, Betty can see that it is just rainwater sloshing against the windowpane; there’s no laundry.

The small tattered AM/FM radio that the girls have beside their mattress came from the dusty space behind their mother’s shoeboxes at the top of the closet. It now sits on the floor keeping them company. Their favorite station, the one with all of the popular music, stopped broadcasting earlier in the day, but they’ve managed to bring up something else, the tinny voice of a woman softly singing. The girls don’t know what this faraway woman is singing, but they can hear her at least. They at least have something to listen to besides the rain. They are not used to sleeping in the attic.

Their mother is somewhere downstairs. Their father is somewhere out in the rain. He’s packing sandbags together somewhere out in this rain, one on top of the other, building a wall of sandbags, one on top of the other.

A strong flash of lightning makes daylight appear in the attic. The light attacks the dark corner where the little girls lay. It exposes old cardboard boxes, a playpen covered in cobwebs, a bookshelf stocked with a cookbooks, old yellowing yellow National Geographics and a pink pair of rollerblades Betty hasn’t used in years. There is a stroller missing a wheel and a box that says MARTIN’S in faded red permanent marker. There is a ragged sheet covering a microwave and a weight bench without weights. The lightning exposes these things in a magical flare before bursting out like a blown light bulb.

“What if it never stops raining?” Helen, still small like a figurine, asks her older sister. The woman on the radio is not singing anymore. Her voice is suddenly lost somewhere in a dark waterfall of quiet static.

Betty thinks for a moment. In the blackness, on the mattress that her mother took from her bed and hauled, wrestling inch by inch, down the hall and up the retractable ladder to the attic, Betty lay thinking. And Betty doesn’t know the answer. She’s been wondering herself: What if it doesn’t stop raining? This has never happened before. What if it is like this forever?

“I think our house might float away, Helen,” Betty says, finally. “You’ve heard of houseboats haven’t you?”

Helen says yes, even though she has never heard of a houseboat. Helen says yes anyway. And then she pictures their house, two stories and tan as an almond, sailing on top of a lake. She pictures it cutting through the water and she imagines her mother, wearing a shiny emerald green one-piece bathing suit, on skis behind the house. She imagines her mother being pulled along behind the house, the water spraying, the water spraying in a mist and her mother laughing, holding onto a cord with one hand and waving with the other.

“Well, our house will be a houseboat if it keeps raining, Helen.”

Betty scoots along the mattress closer to her sister, pulling the nubby blanket up around their shoulders. The rain is flying sideways into the window at the end of the room. It sounds like popcorn popping or lots of gunshots from an old Western movie.

Betty continues: “It could rain that much. Or, it might not. But if it does, one morning we might wake up for school and everything will be floating on the water. All the other houses will be boats too and so it wouldn’t be so bad, Helen.”

“But then why is Daddy piling all of those bags of sand? If we’re just gonna float up on a houseboat, why?”

Betty doesn’t know. She pictures the sandbags her father is out stacking. She envisions each one, imagines how heavy they are, like the lumpy sacks of potatoes that her mother buys from the market to make stew. She thinks of them underwater. What purpose could they serve?

“Um. Well, just think about it. If our house is a boat and we float around during the day, we’ll need to know where to park it again at night, right? That’s what those bags of sand are for. They’ll mark where our house belongs.” This makes sense to Helen. So, Betty continues: “But don’t worry about that anyways. What’s really cool is that I think we’ll look out the window and it’ll be like the pool next door to Grandma’s house. The whole town will be like a beautiful blue swimming pool and I bet Mom would let us dive off the roof and the roof will be like the diving board at the Y and Dad will build us a ladder so that we can climb up the side of the house and get back in.”

Betty isn’t exactly sure that it will be like a swimming pool. She is eight and she doesn’t know. But that sounds possible to her.

“I’m really excited about it,” she says. “How cool will it be to stand on the roof and look down and see our yard underneath the water? We can do races to the fire hydrant and we could swim down through the peach tree. It will be like seaweed.”

The lightning comes again. In the flash, Betty sees, through the fine strands of blond hair covering her sister’s face, that Helen’s eyes are closed. Helen is sleeping. Helen has fallen asleep and Betty decides to hush up. She puts her arm around her sister and snuggles in beside her tiny pajama-clad body. She closes her own eyes. She thinks about which bathing suit she would want to put on in the morning. She pictures herself in the purple and pink swimsuit, the one with the matching tank top, the one that her mother got her last year for the Fourth of July barbecue. Then Betty imagines herself in the purple and pink swimsuit, swimming in circles around the house and doing cannonballs out of her upstairs bedroom window. Betty smiles and soon she too falls asleep, dreaming about a happy new world, a world underwater.

Inspired by “Above Flood Stage,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.