The Highest Hill Around

They took refuge atop the highest hill around. Trees all around were snapped in half so the climb took twice as long. The wind had died down but the water was still rising. It was only a matter of time before they would be standing not on a hill but an island. As if in a dream you can’t wake from, the more they trudged forward the more the earth melted at their feet. Courtney, the youngest of the three, was the first to dig her feet into the ground and wail. Her sister and brother snapped her up and carried her the rest of the way.

“Where’s Mommy?” She said over and over while bouncing on her brother’s shoulders, the view of the swamped valley bobbing up and down in front of her.

“She’s going to meet us here,” he lied.

Courtney repeated the question until she grew tired of it and fell asleep in her brother’s lap. They took cover under the limb of a leafless tree that was beaten but still standing, like a boxer in the last round, swinging his final punches. Rain continued to fall and the water rose on either side of them. Courtney whimpered in her sleep and they discussed their course of action and bleakly realized they had none. So they waited.

Hundreds of miles away Tom removed his glasses and set them on the nightstand next to his bed; gently peeling away the covers, then delicately slid into bed next to his wife who lay there pretending to be asleep. The green glow from the digital alarm clock lit the room in fluorescent guilt. Birds one by one began to announce the morning.

“Tom?” She asked. His body twitched.

The seconds before he answered felt to her like acupuncture pins, painfully soothing, cathartic, a long awaited release.

“Yes.”

She stirred, her feet curled into balls. “Where have you been, Tom?”

Outside the newspaper landed against the front door, the headlines screamed: Giant Flood Kills Thousands. The neighbors’ sprinklers went on, the one closest to thier house was broken and a huge puddle formed on their side of the driveway in the shape of a hat. Inside, his wife waited with her head in the guillotine, her stomach chewed up from Scotch and Percodan, the answer coming in the shape of a blade.

By noon the rain let up and the water reached its top. Every bird for miles was perched in the tree above them. The kids took comfort in their presence. Squirrels and rabbits and lizards had made it to safety too. More and more birds were flying in from all direction. The sky was full of wings. Way off in the distance the kids watched flares bursting with light, thought they were fireworks — it still being the Fourth of July somewhere. The sun carved holes in the clouds and shined through with circles of golden light; the water, so real with death possessed an unreal beauty, the kids had thought that in fact they did die, and that this was heaven.

When Courtney woke up she saw a gray bunny hoping towards her, its ears long and dirty and dragging through the mud. She giggled with pleasure, unable to tell reality from a dream, unable to remember the horrors of that morning. She languidly reached her arm out to touch the rabbit’s nose like God touching Adam’s finger upside on the ceiling.