Noah and the Great Flood (WIP)
Aug. 8th, 2012 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaWill be updating this post as I continue the story. For now, this is my saving-in-case-my-computer-crashes post for The Great Flood Story. Taking a break from near-constant drawing today to work on it for August NaNoWriMo, give my wrist another reason to cramp up and die ...
I feel kind of shitty posting this now, what with the flooding in Manila.
Title: Noah and the Great Flood (to be changed, once I find something slightly more idiosyncratic)
Length: 4k and counting
Summary: Noah leaves his aunt’s house by canoe on the seventh day after floodwaters sweep in and cover the town of Lawton, Oklahoma.
Noah and the Great Flood
Noah leaves his aunt’s house by canoe on the seventh day after floodwaters sweep in and cover the town of Lawton, Oklahoma. He doesn’t own the canoe and doesn’t know the layout of the land — he’s only in town for his cousin’s wedding, he should have been on Long Island — but he’s on the rowing team at college, so he won’t tire as easily as his uncle with his pot belly and emphysema, and he’s not the newly married groom, who should have as much time with his new bride as possible before the inevitable happens.
Noah doesn’t want to go. He’s wanted nothing more than to pack up and drive with his parents back to Huntington since Sarah woke him up at 3:03am seven nights ago to tell him that there was water coming in through the garage, and could he please attain verticality and help them move the wedding decorations up to the second floor? He couldn’t of course; family was family, and besides, the roads were flooded out. Dry summer dirt washed away in the face of the deluge, turning the dirt roads to mud and cracking the paved roads with the waters’ force. By the time anyone realized what was happening, only the most determined owners of all-terrain vehicles were able to make their way to the store and back, stocking up on fresh water and cans of beans.
That had been the first day.
By the second day, muddy grey water lapped the countertops in Aunt Peggy’s kitchen, and everyone — Peggy and her husband and Carly and Sarah and Carly’s new husband Bobby and Bobby’s parents and four siblings and Noah’s mother and father and Grandma and Grandpa — crowded into the master bedroom on the second floor. Noah played cards with Bobby’s stepsisters, who were still in middle school, and the adults crowded around Grandpa’s battery-operated radio to listen to the static. Occasionally, they would get snatches of communication, newscasters speaking in crackling syllables cut short.
“Total rainfall is now forty inch…“
“…FEMA spokesperson M…”
“Hospitals … struggling … seventy …”
“This is bullshit,” said Sarah, storming out of the room. Noah looked up when the door slammed, and Aunt Peggy shouted after her not to swear in front of “the girls”. Jeanine and Cady looked at each other and smirked over their hands of cards.
“Rummy,” said Noah.
Jeanine laid down her cards. “Shit.”
&
The rain hadn’t stopped by the fifth day. Sometimes it thundered, and it shook the eaves of the house, in the attic where the family gathered. The radio died halfway through Sunday afternoon. For the first time, Noah was grateful for Grandpa’s wandering mind and wavering voice: with them, he spent the daylight hours recreating World War II from the deck of the USS Iowa, while his children chimed in to remind him of details. Noah listened with one ear as Grandpa demonstrated the correct method for sleeping in a hammock on a stormy sea, and Noah looked out at the floodwaters as they crept up towards the attic window. He could see their neighbors in the attic of their own house. A boy his own age, skinny and pale, waved at him from the other house.
“Pleased to meet you,” Noah shouted over the roaring of the rain and surging waters.
“I’m Joseph,” shouted the boy. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“My cousin got married on Wednesday; I’m just visiting,” Noah yelled back, before his mom told him to be quiet; Grandpa was still talking.
The following day, Grandpa’s throat was sore, so Grandma picked up where he had left off. Her voice boomed out over the downpour and Uncle Greg’s rumbling stomach as she described how she met Grandpa, how a man spit on her while she marched in a demonstration in Oklahoma City, and Grandpa — who had been walking back to work after lunch hour — walked right up to that man and punched him.
“He got my name before the police took him away,” she said, “and when he got out of jail, he came knocking on my door with flowers. It was love at first sight.” She squeezed Grandpa’s hand.
“Aw, Ma, don’t go embarrassing the kids,” said Aunt Peggy.
Grandma told them about the wedding — “June thirteenth, sixty-seven, just as soon as we could” — and Noah stepped over Jeanine’s toy ponies to look out the window. The boy from yesterday wasn’t there, and the windows were dark, but that could mean anything. There hadn’t been electricity since the wedding. Noah pressed his face against the window and tried to look sideways, out across to the other houses. The roof of another neighbors’ house had all but disappeared under the deluge because it only had one and a half floors, and Noah thought about the elderly couple he’d seen sitting on the front porch and he wondered what had happened to them. He turned away from the window and listened to Bobby’s ma and Grandma talk about Bruce Springsteen and let his mind wander back to Long Island and his friends there, and what had happened to them; whether the water had reached them yet.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a bright red streak in the grey beyond the window pane; Noah turned his head, and Joseph waved at him from the buoyant safety of a kayak. On his lap sat a small dog, of the kind that looked like an oversized rat at the best of times and now, soaked through and shivering, didn’t look as though it should have survived that long.
Noah opened the window, which creaked in protest of the movement disturbing the now-warped wooden frame. His mom and dad and Jeanine, the three people closest to the window, looked up at the noise, but he turned his back on them and leaned out the window. Rain pelted his head and blurred his vision. “Hey, Joseph!” he shouted. “What are you doing?”
Joseph flailed with his paddles to maneuver the kayak back towards the house. “Do you see the government coming in to save us?” he asked. “Nah. I’m striking out for higher ground with Dog.”
Noah stretched out a hand as the kayak came closer; Joseph’s fingers closed around his wrist, and Noah pulled him as close to the house as he could. The red plastic knocked against the dirty white siding. “Is there anyone else in your house?”
Dog barked. Behind him, Noah could feel everyone in his family getting up to crowd around the window, to peer out at the storm and the rain and the boy with his dog in a kayak in Aunt Peggy’s front yard. “My mom was taking a spa weekend,” said Joseph. “My brother was out visiting his California girlfriend ‘cause the one in Texas has the flu. I guess it’s just me now, but I left them a note in case anyone gets back before me.”
“Are you crazy? What are you going to eat?” asked Uncle Greg, looming over Noah’s shoulder.
Joseph rattled around a long black pole at his side that stuck out over the back of the kayak. “Reuben taught me how to fish before he turned into a creep. I swear I saw dolphins heading east yesterday. I hauled up the canoe from the basement, too; it’s in the attic, if you want to come with.” He looked at Noah hopefully.
Noah turned around, and looked at his family. They had soaked through their clothing with sweat already, and they were running out of food very quickly, but no one looked awful. Or maybe he’s just lost his basis for comparison. “Not yet,” he said. “Thanks.”
Joseph shrugged. “It’s there if you want it. Good luck!”
“You too,” said Noah. He released the other boy’s hand, and watched as Joseph paddles away clumsily, fishing pole and backpack and the endless sheets of rain twisting his outline into something bulky and inhuman.
On the seventh day, Noah and his family were done resting. He woke up on the dusty floorboards with his father on one side and Carly on the other, his stomach cramping with hunger and the sun already well up over the horizon because what was the point in waking up early when there was nothing to do and nothing to eat. Grandma sat in the rocking chair they had salvaged from the living room on the first night, and Grandpa looked out the open window. Noah got up quietly and padded across the humidity-dampened floorboards to join him.
“You see Sarah?” asked Grandpa, without turning his head. “She left a couple of minutes ago; how long does it take to haul a damn boat across the yard, is what I want to know.”
Noah followed his gaze through the steady grey downpour to the house across the street, where the water had started pouring in through their attic window. “Sarah?” he asked.
A flicker of movement in the other house caught his eye, and he squinted to try to see what was going on, but he needn’t have, because a moment later, the edge of the window splintered outwards with a loud crack. And again, and again, until Noah could pick out the flash of a metal hammer as it was swung into the side of the window. He opened his mouth to shout, then looked back at the members of his family still sprawled out, asleep, on the floor, so instead he spoke to his grandpa as quietly as the rain would allow. “What’s she doing?”
“Am I the one with hearing aids, or are you?” Grandpa asked. “I said, she’s going to get the Jacobson’s canoe.”
Noah didn’t need ask why; his fingertips, curled over the edge of the window frame, hovered only three or four inches above the floodwaters, with droplets splashing him as the water slapped the sides of the house. And the rain still poured down. He hadn’t seen any sign of life since Joseph left yesterday; and before that, not since he left Carly and Bobby’s wedding reception and gave a halfhearted wave to the woman down the road as she walked her dog that night.
&
No one will listen to anything that he has to say in the matter. “What good am I gonna do, huh?” asks Uncle Gary. “The last time I lifted anything heavier than a pot roast was when I carried Peggy over the threshold of this house. You think I’m getting anywhere in this canoe? I wouldn’t even make it past the town border.”
“What about Carly and Bobby?” Noah asks, desperately, looking from his uncle to his cousins to Bobby’s parents to his grandparents to Jeanine and Cady where they are exiled to the corner of the attic like it will stop them from trying to overhear the conversation going on around the canoe as it drips steaming puddles onto the wooden floor. “I mean, you just got married, why don’t you go? Why me and Sarah?”
“Excuse you, I want to live,” says Sarah.
“Yeah, but what,” — Noah gestures at Bobby’s sisters as they watch the proceedings with toy ponies limp and unused in their hands. “What about your sisters, Bobby, you just gonna let them sit here, too?”
“Shut up. You think I like this, kid, you think I got down on my knees last week and said, ‘Oh Lord, let there be a flood on my wedding day, let me get holed up in my in-law’s house while we slowly starve to death?’ Course not.” Bobby’s face is red and blotchy and Noah has a friend like him, who gets angry when she’s scared, and that’s the only reason that Noah doesn’t shout back at him.
“Honey, you two go with our blessing,” says Grandma. She holds out her hands, and Aunt Peggy and Noah’s dad each take a hand between their own and lift her out of the chair. She hobbles forwards with their assistance and stands in front of Noah and Sarah, wrinkled face upturned to meet their gazes with her frizzy gray hair standing out around her head like a demented halo. “And when this is all over, you tell people about this. You tell people how we been stuck here for a week with no help, nothing, and you ain’t gonna stand for it when you know if we were in New York or DC or somewhere big and important that there’d have been flood warnings and evacuations like you wouldn’t believe. You got that, you two?”
Noah looked at Sarah and found her looking down at their grandmother with something that looked like tears in her eyes, though it could just have been that she hadn’t dried off all the way because it was so humid that anything she used to get rid of the water soaking through her would never have dried before the room was flooded and it was all a moot point anyway. “We’ll do that, Grandma,” she says.
“No we won’t, ‘cause we’re not going,” shouts Noah, but his voice is drowned out by an almighty clap of thunder as though the heavens are tearing themselves apart directly over the roof of the Landeck’s house.
&
The canoe is packed with two ancient fishing poles salvaged from the junk at the far end of the attic; a tarp from the same; a pound of beef jerky from the supplies that Sarah took from the Jacobson’s house along with the canoe; Grandma’s quilt, wrapped in a plastic bag that used to hold a Lego set belonging to Carly when she was a child; a trashy romance novel that Sarah insists on bringing for reasons that Noah doesn’t care about; matches; and two empty water bottles. “It isn’t like you’ll be short on water,” Noah’s dad tells him, setting them on the bottom of the canoe. Noah punches him in the chest, not hard enough to bruise but hard enough to sting, and his dad grabs him into a crushing hug that traps his arms against his sides.
He says his goodbyes as quickly as possible. “I don’t want platitudes,” he tells them. “If it ain’t useful, keep your mouth shut.”
“You remember what I always say,” says Grandpa. “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
“That’s Yogi Bera,” Noah says, but he hugs his Grandpa anyway. Sarah takes longer, lingering over her goodbyes and picking up Jeanine and Cady to whisper things in their ears that make them giggle and sniff. Noah watches her with one impatient eye, keeping the other on the canoe that floats now outside the window, held in place by twine and Uncle Greg’s firm hand. Another tarp — a product of Carly’s days spent camping with the Girl Scouts — covers it for now, making sure it doesn’t sink before they can even get started.
When the time comes, Noah clambers in after Sarah and almost tips the whole thing over because his hand slips on the wet seat and he falls on his elbow. He shakes out his arm, hissing, and then picks up his paddle. Uncle Greg lets go of the twine. As he and Sarah push the canoe away from the house, Noah stares at the window until his eyes hurt. Uncle Greg and Aunt Peggy are there, pressed against one side; Noah’s parents are on the other. Grandma is sitting in the middle, Grandpa standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, and Carly and Bobby and Bobby’s family are grouped behind them, waving like Noah and Sarah are going out to the city and will be back in an hour or so. The rain soaks into Noah’s skin and runs rivulets into his eyes, so that it feels like he’s crying. He shuts his eyes firmly, pressing the image into his memory, and then he turns around and steers them west.
&
“How are you holding up?” Noah asks, raising his voice to make himself heard over the rumble of thunder.
Sarah gives him a withering look and turns her attention back to pushing her paddle through the water in the broad, even strokes that Noah has spent the last two hours coaching her into using. “My shoulders hurt like a motherfucker. Don’t even tell me if you aren’t feeling it.”
“Give me another hour or two,” Noah lies. “I do this for three hours every weekday, five am to eight am.” He doesn’t add that he has never rowed continuously the entire time, in a pond rather than on a floodplain that stretches out towards the horizon in all directions, and not after a week of slowly dwindling food supplies, cramped in an attic without exercise.
“Hurrah for you,” she says. “Where’s the water bottle; it’s my turn to bail.” This is something they have had to do once already, and it occurs to Noah with an unpleasant sinking sensation in his stomach that, in addition to being soaked through for the foreseeable future; in addition to trying to go to sleep in a fucking canoe that is also wet; if they don’t find land by nightfall, they are also going to have to keep waking themselves up so that they don’t sink in the middle of the night with accumulated rainwater.
Noah didn’t know it was possible for rain to keep going this consistently, for this length of time, especially not out of nowhere like this. There hadn’t been anything on the weather reports, had there? His mother had gone out and bought extra-strength sunscreen for their stay, because it was supposed to be sunny all week, and somehow she was under the impression that the sun in Oklahoma was fatally stronger than the sun in New York. Or maybe it is, something to do with the tilt of the earth’s axis; Noah has no idea. He voices his thoughts to Sarah as they slowly make their way through the flood towards what looks like a hilltop in the distance.
“What, you missed the weather bulletin?” Sarah asks, sloshing another bottleful of water over the edge of the canoe and squinting up at the rain that plastered her hair in strings over her face. “Watch out for the freak storm that’s about to hit fucking everywhere. More news at ten.”
“Hey, I don’t know. I don’t pay attention,” Noah says.
She snorts.
They paddle on silently, under an endless expanse of dark grey sky that stretches on and on until it meets the lighter grey of the newly created ocean over the heartland of America. Around them, treetops bloom straight out of the water, most of their leaves torn off by the relentless downpour. In the south, distantly, Noah can make out the tops of buildings sticking out of the water like lifeless blocky islands. There is one building that might be a City Hall or something like that: windows are still visible, rows of black eyes with dull green borders in a brick face. He strains his eyes for signs of life within them, but he can see nothing. It doesn’t mean anything, of course — there could be people that he can’t see, or they could be staying away from the windows for fear of flooding.
“Steer straight,” Sarah calls. “There’s a tree up there that’s directly west; we’re heading towards that.”
Noah tears his eyes away from the empty windows and looks ahead, correcting their path from his position in the back of the canoe.
After three hours (according to his dying cell phone) his arms are aching with every stroke, and he can only imagine how Sarah must feel. His hands have the benefit of calluses built up by several seasons of rowing, but she has no such thing working to her advantage, in addition to not much experience rowing. Still, Noah will not be the first one to call for a rest. He has a reputation to uphold.
It takes another half an hour before Sarah lays her oar across her lap. Without turning around, she says, “We’re stopping now. Just for a little while. I need a break.”
“Yeah, okay. Whatever.” Noah speaks casually, hiding his relief. He mimics her pose, hands resting loose over the oar and shaking with the effort of staying open after being clenched for so long around the handle. The canoe drifts forwards, listing to the left without anything to dictate its course besides the sea. Noah lets his gaze roam out over the water. A branch floats by with a few leaves clinging to the surface of the water; he reaches out with his oar and prods it away. Something about the action strikes him as odd. Noah isn’t a particularly clever person, and he knows better than to try to drag thoughts kicking and screaming to the surface of his mind before they’re ready, so he shields his eyes and watches water run down Sarah’s back, waiting for the thought to arrive in its own time.
Debris, he thinks. In floods this high, there should be debris everywhere: branches, litter, leaves, junk that the waters have picked out of people’s yards and homes, maybe even — and he tries very hard not to dwell on this — bodies. Instead, the surface of the water is clear. A few branches, here and there, but nothing like the glut of garbage that the flood should have swept up to the surface. It makes him uneasy, sort of sick to his stomach.
&
SECOND DAY~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
“You write, don't you?” Noah asks, on the second day. After trying various configurations, many of which nearly ended in the capsizing of their fragile boat, they had settled on shoving everything really bulky towards the prow and stern of the boat, and curling up, back to back, in the middle. It was uncomfortable, and Noah's feet kept cramping – not to mention that rain still fell heavy on his face – but after what felt like half the night, he had finally been able to drift into an uneasy doze. If they kept this up another few days, he thought, he would eventually get so tired that he'd be able to fall asleep like this more easily, but he banished the thought. The entire continental United States wasn't as flat or as close to sea level as Oklahoma, and he and Sarah were fairly competent with the oars; they'd find land sooner rather than later.
“How did you know that?” Sarah asks,
“My mom would say. Oh, your cousin Sarah got published, Aunt Peggy says. Seventeen, and already a published author! What are you doing with your life, Noah?” His impression of his mom's voice is high and nasal, and his mom never actually spoke like that (speaks, present tense, speaks) but she could have. Lots of people do, and Sarah doesn't have to know.
Sarah sort-of laughs. They're still wet, and in a canoe, and she's probably putting too much effort into rowing to have breath left over for laughing, but it's a start. “She never did say that,” Sarah says. “Why would she tell your parents?”
“Probably because they're sisters, and she wanted to show you off. It's a big fucking deal.” Noah had read the story. It hadn't been his thing – some girly piece about going to Girl Scout camp and not needing a dude to feel validated – but he wasn't about to deny that it had been a good piece of writing.
“Hey.” Sarah stops rowing for a moment, letting the oar trail through the water. “You swore. I didn't know you swore.”
Noah hits her oar with his own to get her going again. He snorts. “Cause you always see me around my mom. You know how some people have, like, a swear jar? She'd just take my stuff away. You'd quit swearing real fast, too.”
'I see.' Sarah doesn't seem to know what to say to that, and Noah curses himself for not being able to keep up a conversation. On campus, he's known among his friends for being the life of the party, and now – now, when it really counts, when there's no one else to step in and take his place, and his sanity might depend on this conversation's continuing – he can't manage to not sound awkward. So he tries to steer the conversation back towards its intended direction.
“So anyway, like I was saying. You tell stories,” he says.
“Sometimes.” Sarah is scowling now, and he can't tell whether it's at him, or whether it's a grimace because they're still in a canoe and still drenched. He guesses it's a combination, which means that he might still have a shot.
“So tell a story. We don't have anything else to do,” he suggests.
“What are you, five? I tell bedtime stories to Jeanine,” Sarah says. She grunts and drags her oar through the water. Noah figures that it was worth a shot, and he is in the process of finding a line of conversation that might actually prove fruitful when she sighs and says, “Fine. What do you want a story about?”
“I don't know. Do you got any stories that take place in deserts? I could go for a desert right about now.”
“You don't say. Okay, here. I'm so tired that we'd probably end up in fucking Wonderland if I tried to make something up, so you get to hear an excerpt from The Arabian Nights.”
“All right.” Noah tries to infuse his voice with enthusiasm; he guesses that it's kind of like trying to come up with at least a ninety on a math test after your roommates kept you up all night partying: sometimes, that shit just doesn't come. “But if I don't like it, I reserve the right to cut off your head with every weapon available to me in this canoe.”
Sarah just rolls her eyes. “Yeah, all that beef jerky’s looking real threatening right about now. Jackass. So once upon a time, there was this man named Ali Baba.”
&
NINTH DAY~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
The ninth day dawns grey, with a lightness in the east that is the only indication that Noah has of the continued existence of the sun. He turns the boat around for a while and sits, shivering, watching the light spread and paddling gently to keep it in place. He guesses that it’s about seven o’clock in the morning, and a dull, cramping ache in his shoulders testifies to the fact that he has been paddling on and off since sundown. The skin on his fingers is raw and painful; the near-constant wet makes it easy for the calluses to rub off, and now the rain and the friction of the oar have conspired to start tearing at the already-tender skin underneath. It stings with every stroke, but he’s seen Sarah’s fingers in the precious few moments when they are awake at the same time, and is grateful that he had the initial calluses, and thus is only now starting to feel the sting.
He stops staring at the horizon, adjusts his hat, and starts to turn the canoe back west. It’s impossible to know how far they have gone, but, he figures, it would take an awful lot of water to cover the Rockies in their entirety. If they keep going west, sooner or later, they’ll find some sort of landmark, some destination.
They have to.
Noah wonders what happened to Joseph. He wonders whether they’ll find him floating in the water, eventually, him and his dog and his kayak. You’d think that a bright red kayak would be hard to miss, right?
“Is it my turn yet?”
Sarah’s sleepy voice drags him back to the present. He looks down, where she lies on top of their supplies at the bottom of the canoe, shielded from the rain by the tarp and a hat over her face. The hat is now tilted up by one pale, wet hand, and she winces at the dull light.
“Yeah, sure,” Noah says. He’s pretty sure that he could keep going for another hour or so, until the brightness that marked the sun was farther overheard, but it stopped being a point of pride to do more than his share right around the time he passed out from hunger on day five. “I’m beat.”
She props the hat up, and slides her legs from between his feet. The soggy remnants of her paperback novel slide to the bottom of the canoe, and the boat rocks as she reaches back to retrieve it. Noah grips the sides to steady himself while she picks herself up and settles back onto her seat. “Do I need to fish today, or did you leave me anything to eat?”
“Fishing today.”
Sarah looks out to her left, as though hoping for someone to come along and tell him that he was selfish and greedy for eating the last of the bass. Noah grits his teeth. He isn’t going to say anything, he isn’t going to rise to the bait; he is exhausted and sick to his stomach and he is still going to take the moral high ground. “I can stay up to fish and cook, and then go to sleep,” he offers.
She does roll her eyes, then. “No. I’ll kill you.”
Noah is about to tell her that she’s being really mature about this, and he’s trying to be decent, when he notices how dark the circles under her eyes have become, and the weary, resigned tone with which she announces this. Damn it, he thinks. “Okay. But wake me up if you need me to do anything, okay? I’m serious.”
“I’d say ‘when hell freezes over’, but …” Sarah glances around. “Looks like that might already have happened.”
“Nah, that’s not gonna happen now. It’s probably flooded, and you know how the ocean doesn’t freeze at the bottom because it’s too deep, it’s probably like that. It couldn’t freeze in hell even if pigs started to fly,” Noah tells her, dragging the information from a part of his brain that it feels like he hasn’t used in years, instead of a *little over two weeks.
They both look skyward, and Noah has to blink and squint and rub raindrops out of his eyes.
“That’s comforting,” Sarah says finally. “Just … go to sleep, okay?”
“Yep.” Noah passes her the oar, and yawns. He slides off of his seat, and oh god, his butt is sore. In the back of his mind, he remembers something about bedsores, about how paralyzed people need to be moved around so that they don’t get sores, and he hopes like hell that sitting in a canoe for days on end isn’t enough to give him any. That’s the last thing he needs. He kicks Sarah’s ankles until she gives him enough room to lie down, and accepts the tarp to drag over himself. As far as blankets go, it is without a doubt the worst one that he has ever used — and that includes the one that his best friend in high school lent to him, the one that gave him lice and hadn’t been washed for a length of time that even Noah agreed was unsanitary — but maybe, if he keeps really still, then he’ll be able to dry off a little bit before he wakes up. He pulls the hat down over his face, leans his head back against the plastic bag that still keeps Grandma’s quilt dry, and shuts his eyes.
As he lets the uneven rocking of the canoe lull him to sleep, he thinks about Grandpa telling everyone about how to sleep in a hammock on a Navy battleship during a storm. He folds his arms across his chest and grips the edges of the tarp. I wonder if this is anything like that, he thinks, before exhaustion claims him, and he falls asleep.
&
TWELFTH DAY~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
When he wakes up on the afternoon of the twelfth day, it is from a frenzied dream in which he runs a race around a neon green track in competition with his elementary school gym teacher, and it is to the sound of Sarah sobbing. Noah forces himself to lie still for a moment, smelling the stale, sour inside of his hat, and listening. It could be that he’s misheard, it could be that she’s laughing, or that she has the hiccups, or a million other things. So he lies on his back and holds his fingers curled lightly around the tarp as they had been when he was roused, and listens. At first, the din of the rain clattering on the tarp distracts him, but he pushes past it, straining his ears, until he hears a shuddering intake of breath, followed by choked-off groan.
Sarah is crying. Noah shuts his eyes again, goading his mind into gear. Think, Noah, think, why is your cousin crying, what do you do, do you ‘wake up’ and try to help and fail, and feel awkward about it and there’s nowhere to go if she decides that you suck at comforting, which you do by the way, or do you stay asleep and hope she’s done by the time your turn with the oar comes around, that’s a better idea, let’s do that, and Noah is about to do just that when he hears Sarah say, barely audible over the rain, “Noah.”
He twitches at the sound of his name, so it’s no good pretending anymore. Noah pushes his hat back onto his head, instead of his face, and slides up and out from under the tarp.
Sarah is sitting across from him, oar laid across her lap and head bowed. She jerks her head up when he moves, and he realizes, belatedly, that maybe she didn’t see him after all — until now, that is. “Oh,” she says, sounding surprised.
Noah leans on his elbows with the edge of the seat digging into his back. Her eyes are puffy, though he can’t tell whether her cheeks are red in the waning afternoon light. He doesn’t know what to say; they’ve hardly spoken to each other in days, emotional distance being the only kind of distance that they can afford under the circumstances, and it’s not as though they have ever been close: he can count on one hand the number of times that they have even been under the same roof since Sarah was born. And now they are sharing a canoe, and he watches her try to avoid his gaze.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she demands, finally.
“I’m tired,” he says, because it’s true and it is easy.
“Go back to sleep, then,” she snaps.
Reverse psychology. Noah knows this one. He rubs his eyes and sits up all the way, shedding the tarp and clasping his hands on his knees. “I’m not. What’s the matter?”
Sarah swallows another shuddering cry, and waves a hand around at them. “We’re in the middle of a fucking ocean, dumbass.”
Noah looks around, even though he has the view memorized by now. “I know.”
“So? That’s it. Go back to sleep.” Sarah scrubs her face with her wrist, for all the good that it does her; it simply means that rainwater is what gets in her eyes, rather than tears.
Noah takes a deep breath. This is the last thing that he wants to do — he would much rather take her advice, and try to sleep for another few hours before it’s his turn to paddle — but he is stranded within three feet of this girl for the foreseeable future, and she is his family. Possibly the only family he has left. He owes it to her to try. “Listen … if you want to talk about whatever it is … I’m not going anywhere. You can talk to me.”
Sarah glares at him; for several long, uncomfortable moments, the only sound in the world is that of rain bouncing off of the canoe and hitting the sea around them. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” Noah breathes a mental sigh of relief, even though he knows he has to plow ahead anyway. He has to try, at least. “Is there … do you want me to do anything? Besides go back to sleep, I know you want me to do that already.”
She covers her face with her hands. In putting them to her face, she releases the oar, which starts to slide, paddle first, into the sea. Noah lunges across the boat to grab it before it is lost to the waters forever. The canoe rocks with the motion, but not enough to capsize them; just enough that they both have to seize the sides of the canoe to prevent themselves from losing balance. When Sarah does so, Noah can see that her eyes have filled with fresh tears.
“Thanks,” she says, voice breaking as she takes back the paddle. “Fuck. Fuck.” As they sit back and settle down again, she plunges her oar into the swirling waters and pushes them forwards with a strained, savage motion. It does little but set them on a northwest course, and Noah hastens to correct them because if they get off course now, then there is no telling where they might end up, and they can’t afford to make navigational mistakes by giving in to whims like that.
“Jesus,” Noah says.
“Noah.” His name in her mouth comes out sharp and brittle. “Shut up. You want to know why I was crying? I am crying because this is not okay. I have not been dry in nearly two weeks. We are living off of fish that is either charred or raw, and I’m sick of it. I want a real bed, I want food that doesn’t taste like shit, I want to stand up and walk around, and I want it to stop. Raining.” Her voice rises to a scream as she finishes, chest heaving. Noah stares at her. “I could deal with everything else. I could deal with being trapped on a motherfucking canoe. But I can’t stand that we have to bail the canoe out every few hours or else it overflows; I can’t stand that we have to hover right the fuck over the fire to keep it going; and I wouldn’t care that we’re surrounded by motherfucking Atlantis right now, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m pretty sure that if it wasn’t raining, then maybe my skin would get a chance to dry out, instead of peeling off in chunks! It’s disgusting!” She sets her oar between her knees, so that it won’t fall this time as she shakes her hands in the air and lets out a frustrated shout.
&
FOURTEENTH DAY~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
Noah dreams that he is deaf. He runs down the street in his hometown, knocking on doors and shouting uselessly at everyone, but the only sound is his voice pounding in his ears while their mouths open and close like goldfish. It's nightmarish, and he is grateful beyond measure when someone kicks his shin. Then he stops to wonder why he's curled into an uncomfortable ball, with someone else in his bed at that angle. He supposes that he's in his dorm room on Long Island, not at home after all, cramped in his bed against someone else because one or more of his off-campus friends got too drunk to drive home. He's guessing that it's Danny, who never learned his limits even after that time he nearly got suspended, and if Danny's here then there's a high probability that Noah is cramped and squashed against the headboard, head pillowed on his dresser, because Danny's boyfriend is occupying the foot of the bed, curled around Danny's car keys as an added preventative measure. Noah opens his eyes to make sure, and alsoto say hello because he's quite fond of both of them even if they're currently giving him back problems.
When he see the clouds over his head, he is momentarily confused; then he shuts his eyes again, and grief washes over him, pressing down and turning his limbs to lead. He curls in even more tightly on himself, tucking his head in as far as it will go in the hopes that he'll wake up a second time, the way that he sometimes does: nightmares within nightmares within more innocuous dreams. Failing that, maybe he can just go back to sleep.
"Noah," Sarah whispers. "Noah, listen."
"Shut up," he mumbles, covering his face with his hands.
"No, no, no, Noah. Listen. Get up. It's stopped raining."
Danny is dead, Noah thinks, All of my friends are dead, and then, What? He takes his hands away from his face and, reluctantly, looks heavenward again. There is no moon, and no stars, still hidden behind thick layers of cloud, but no ceaseless patter of raindrops on his face, either. He takes in a cautious breath, afraid that if he so much as breathes too loudly, it will shake the rain loose from the firmament and bring it down upon them once more.
I feel kind of shitty posting this now, what with the flooding in Manila.
Title: Noah and the Great Flood (to be changed, once I find something slightly more idiosyncratic)
Length: 4k and counting
Summary: Noah leaves his aunt’s house by canoe on the seventh day after floodwaters sweep in and cover the town of Lawton, Oklahoma.
Noah and the Great Flood
Noah leaves his aunt’s house by canoe on the seventh day after floodwaters sweep in and cover the town of Lawton, Oklahoma. He doesn’t own the canoe and doesn’t know the layout of the land — he’s only in town for his cousin’s wedding, he should have been on Long Island — but he’s on the rowing team at college, so he won’t tire as easily as his uncle with his pot belly and emphysema, and he’s not the newly married groom, who should have as much time with his new bride as possible before the inevitable happens.
Noah doesn’t want to go. He’s wanted nothing more than to pack up and drive with his parents back to Huntington since Sarah woke him up at 3:03am seven nights ago to tell him that there was water coming in through the garage, and could he please attain verticality and help them move the wedding decorations up to the second floor? He couldn’t of course; family was family, and besides, the roads were flooded out. Dry summer dirt washed away in the face of the deluge, turning the dirt roads to mud and cracking the paved roads with the waters’ force. By the time anyone realized what was happening, only the most determined owners of all-terrain vehicles were able to make their way to the store and back, stocking up on fresh water and cans of beans.
That had been the first day.
By the second day, muddy grey water lapped the countertops in Aunt Peggy’s kitchen, and everyone — Peggy and her husband and Carly and Sarah and Carly’s new husband Bobby and Bobby’s parents and four siblings and Noah’s mother and father and Grandma and Grandpa — crowded into the master bedroom on the second floor. Noah played cards with Bobby’s stepsisters, who were still in middle school, and the adults crowded around Grandpa’s battery-operated radio to listen to the static. Occasionally, they would get snatches of communication, newscasters speaking in crackling syllables cut short.
“Total rainfall is now forty inch…“
“…FEMA spokesperson M…”
“Hospitals … struggling … seventy …”
“This is bullshit,” said Sarah, storming out of the room. Noah looked up when the door slammed, and Aunt Peggy shouted after her not to swear in front of “the girls”. Jeanine and Cady looked at each other and smirked over their hands of cards.
“Rummy,” said Noah.
Jeanine laid down her cards. “Shit.”
&
The rain hadn’t stopped by the fifth day. Sometimes it thundered, and it shook the eaves of the house, in the attic where the family gathered. The radio died halfway through Sunday afternoon. For the first time, Noah was grateful for Grandpa’s wandering mind and wavering voice: with them, he spent the daylight hours recreating World War II from the deck of the USS Iowa, while his children chimed in to remind him of details. Noah listened with one ear as Grandpa demonstrated the correct method for sleeping in a hammock on a stormy sea, and Noah looked out at the floodwaters as they crept up towards the attic window. He could see their neighbors in the attic of their own house. A boy his own age, skinny and pale, waved at him from the other house.
“Pleased to meet you,” Noah shouted over the roaring of the rain and surging waters.
“I’m Joseph,” shouted the boy. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“My cousin got married on Wednesday; I’m just visiting,” Noah yelled back, before his mom told him to be quiet; Grandpa was still talking.
The following day, Grandpa’s throat was sore, so Grandma picked up where he had left off. Her voice boomed out over the downpour and Uncle Greg’s rumbling stomach as she described how she met Grandpa, how a man spit on her while she marched in a demonstration in Oklahoma City, and Grandpa — who had been walking back to work after lunch hour — walked right up to that man and punched him.
“He got my name before the police took him away,” she said, “and when he got out of jail, he came knocking on my door with flowers. It was love at first sight.” She squeezed Grandpa’s hand.
“Aw, Ma, don’t go embarrassing the kids,” said Aunt Peggy.
Grandma told them about the wedding — “June thirteenth, sixty-seven, just as soon as we could” — and Noah stepped over Jeanine’s toy ponies to look out the window. The boy from yesterday wasn’t there, and the windows were dark, but that could mean anything. There hadn’t been electricity since the wedding. Noah pressed his face against the window and tried to look sideways, out across to the other houses. The roof of another neighbors’ house had all but disappeared under the deluge because it only had one and a half floors, and Noah thought about the elderly couple he’d seen sitting on the front porch and he wondered what had happened to them. He turned away from the window and listened to Bobby’s ma and Grandma talk about Bruce Springsteen and let his mind wander back to Long Island and his friends there, and what had happened to them; whether the water had reached them yet.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a bright red streak in the grey beyond the window pane; Noah turned his head, and Joseph waved at him from the buoyant safety of a kayak. On his lap sat a small dog, of the kind that looked like an oversized rat at the best of times and now, soaked through and shivering, didn’t look as though it should have survived that long.
Noah opened the window, which creaked in protest of the movement disturbing the now-warped wooden frame. His mom and dad and Jeanine, the three people closest to the window, looked up at the noise, but he turned his back on them and leaned out the window. Rain pelted his head and blurred his vision. “Hey, Joseph!” he shouted. “What are you doing?”
Joseph flailed with his paddles to maneuver the kayak back towards the house. “Do you see the government coming in to save us?” he asked. “Nah. I’m striking out for higher ground with Dog.”
Noah stretched out a hand as the kayak came closer; Joseph’s fingers closed around his wrist, and Noah pulled him as close to the house as he could. The red plastic knocked against the dirty white siding. “Is there anyone else in your house?”
Dog barked. Behind him, Noah could feel everyone in his family getting up to crowd around the window, to peer out at the storm and the rain and the boy with his dog in a kayak in Aunt Peggy’s front yard. “My mom was taking a spa weekend,” said Joseph. “My brother was out visiting his California girlfriend ‘cause the one in Texas has the flu. I guess it’s just me now, but I left them a note in case anyone gets back before me.”
“Are you crazy? What are you going to eat?” asked Uncle Greg, looming over Noah’s shoulder.
Joseph rattled around a long black pole at his side that stuck out over the back of the kayak. “Reuben taught me how to fish before he turned into a creep. I swear I saw dolphins heading east yesterday. I hauled up the canoe from the basement, too; it’s in the attic, if you want to come with.” He looked at Noah hopefully.
Noah turned around, and looked at his family. They had soaked through their clothing with sweat already, and they were running out of food very quickly, but no one looked awful. Or maybe he’s just lost his basis for comparison. “Not yet,” he said. “Thanks.”
Joseph shrugged. “It’s there if you want it. Good luck!”
“You too,” said Noah. He released the other boy’s hand, and watched as Joseph paddles away clumsily, fishing pole and backpack and the endless sheets of rain twisting his outline into something bulky and inhuman.
On the seventh day, Noah and his family were done resting. He woke up on the dusty floorboards with his father on one side and Carly on the other, his stomach cramping with hunger and the sun already well up over the horizon because what was the point in waking up early when there was nothing to do and nothing to eat. Grandma sat in the rocking chair they had salvaged from the living room on the first night, and Grandpa looked out the open window. Noah got up quietly and padded across the humidity-dampened floorboards to join him.
“You see Sarah?” asked Grandpa, without turning his head. “She left a couple of minutes ago; how long does it take to haul a damn boat across the yard, is what I want to know.”
Noah followed his gaze through the steady grey downpour to the house across the street, where the water had started pouring in through their attic window. “Sarah?” he asked.
A flicker of movement in the other house caught his eye, and he squinted to try to see what was going on, but he needn’t have, because a moment later, the edge of the window splintered outwards with a loud crack. And again, and again, until Noah could pick out the flash of a metal hammer as it was swung into the side of the window. He opened his mouth to shout, then looked back at the members of his family still sprawled out, asleep, on the floor, so instead he spoke to his grandpa as quietly as the rain would allow. “What’s she doing?”
“Am I the one with hearing aids, or are you?” Grandpa asked. “I said, she’s going to get the Jacobson’s canoe.”
Noah didn’t need ask why; his fingertips, curled over the edge of the window frame, hovered only three or four inches above the floodwaters, with droplets splashing him as the water slapped the sides of the house. And the rain still poured down. He hadn’t seen any sign of life since Joseph left yesterday; and before that, not since he left Carly and Bobby’s wedding reception and gave a halfhearted wave to the woman down the road as she walked her dog that night.
&
No one will listen to anything that he has to say in the matter. “What good am I gonna do, huh?” asks Uncle Gary. “The last time I lifted anything heavier than a pot roast was when I carried Peggy over the threshold of this house. You think I’m getting anywhere in this canoe? I wouldn’t even make it past the town border.”
“What about Carly and Bobby?” Noah asks, desperately, looking from his uncle to his cousins to Bobby’s parents to his grandparents to Jeanine and Cady where they are exiled to the corner of the attic like it will stop them from trying to overhear the conversation going on around the canoe as it drips steaming puddles onto the wooden floor. “I mean, you just got married, why don’t you go? Why me and Sarah?”
“Excuse you, I want to live,” says Sarah.
“Yeah, but what,” — Noah gestures at Bobby’s sisters as they watch the proceedings with toy ponies limp and unused in their hands. “What about your sisters, Bobby, you just gonna let them sit here, too?”
“Shut up. You think I like this, kid, you think I got down on my knees last week and said, ‘Oh Lord, let there be a flood on my wedding day, let me get holed up in my in-law’s house while we slowly starve to death?’ Course not.” Bobby’s face is red and blotchy and Noah has a friend like him, who gets angry when she’s scared, and that’s the only reason that Noah doesn’t shout back at him.
“Honey, you two go with our blessing,” says Grandma. She holds out her hands, and Aunt Peggy and Noah’s dad each take a hand between their own and lift her out of the chair. She hobbles forwards with their assistance and stands in front of Noah and Sarah, wrinkled face upturned to meet their gazes with her frizzy gray hair standing out around her head like a demented halo. “And when this is all over, you tell people about this. You tell people how we been stuck here for a week with no help, nothing, and you ain’t gonna stand for it when you know if we were in New York or DC or somewhere big and important that there’d have been flood warnings and evacuations like you wouldn’t believe. You got that, you two?”
Noah looked at Sarah and found her looking down at their grandmother with something that looked like tears in her eyes, though it could just have been that she hadn’t dried off all the way because it was so humid that anything she used to get rid of the water soaking through her would never have dried before the room was flooded and it was all a moot point anyway. “We’ll do that, Grandma,” she says.
“No we won’t, ‘cause we’re not going,” shouts Noah, but his voice is drowned out by an almighty clap of thunder as though the heavens are tearing themselves apart directly over the roof of the Landeck’s house.
&
The canoe is packed with two ancient fishing poles salvaged from the junk at the far end of the attic; a tarp from the same; a pound of beef jerky from the supplies that Sarah took from the Jacobson’s house along with the canoe; Grandma’s quilt, wrapped in a plastic bag that used to hold a Lego set belonging to Carly when she was a child; a trashy romance novel that Sarah insists on bringing for reasons that Noah doesn’t care about; matches; and two empty water bottles. “It isn’t like you’ll be short on water,” Noah’s dad tells him, setting them on the bottom of the canoe. Noah punches him in the chest, not hard enough to bruise but hard enough to sting, and his dad grabs him into a crushing hug that traps his arms against his sides.
He says his goodbyes as quickly as possible. “I don’t want platitudes,” he tells them. “If it ain’t useful, keep your mouth shut.”
“You remember what I always say,” says Grandpa. “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
“That’s Yogi Bera,” Noah says, but he hugs his Grandpa anyway. Sarah takes longer, lingering over her goodbyes and picking up Jeanine and Cady to whisper things in their ears that make them giggle and sniff. Noah watches her with one impatient eye, keeping the other on the canoe that floats now outside the window, held in place by twine and Uncle Greg’s firm hand. Another tarp — a product of Carly’s days spent camping with the Girl Scouts — covers it for now, making sure it doesn’t sink before they can even get started.
When the time comes, Noah clambers in after Sarah and almost tips the whole thing over because his hand slips on the wet seat and he falls on his elbow. He shakes out his arm, hissing, and then picks up his paddle. Uncle Greg lets go of the twine. As he and Sarah push the canoe away from the house, Noah stares at the window until his eyes hurt. Uncle Greg and Aunt Peggy are there, pressed against one side; Noah’s parents are on the other. Grandma is sitting in the middle, Grandpa standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, and Carly and Bobby and Bobby’s family are grouped behind them, waving like Noah and Sarah are going out to the city and will be back in an hour or so. The rain soaks into Noah’s skin and runs rivulets into his eyes, so that it feels like he’s crying. He shuts his eyes firmly, pressing the image into his memory, and then he turns around and steers them west.
&
“How are you holding up?” Noah asks, raising his voice to make himself heard over the rumble of thunder.
Sarah gives him a withering look and turns her attention back to pushing her paddle through the water in the broad, even strokes that Noah has spent the last two hours coaching her into using. “My shoulders hurt like a motherfucker. Don’t even tell me if you aren’t feeling it.”
“Give me another hour or two,” Noah lies. “I do this for three hours every weekday, five am to eight am.” He doesn’t add that he has never rowed continuously the entire time, in a pond rather than on a floodplain that stretches out towards the horizon in all directions, and not after a week of slowly dwindling food supplies, cramped in an attic without exercise.
“Hurrah for you,” she says. “Where’s the water bottle; it’s my turn to bail.” This is something they have had to do once already, and it occurs to Noah with an unpleasant sinking sensation in his stomach that, in addition to being soaked through for the foreseeable future; in addition to trying to go to sleep in a fucking canoe that is also wet; if they don’t find land by nightfall, they are also going to have to keep waking themselves up so that they don’t sink in the middle of the night with accumulated rainwater.
Noah didn’t know it was possible for rain to keep going this consistently, for this length of time, especially not out of nowhere like this. There hadn’t been anything on the weather reports, had there? His mother had gone out and bought extra-strength sunscreen for their stay, because it was supposed to be sunny all week, and somehow she was under the impression that the sun in Oklahoma was fatally stronger than the sun in New York. Or maybe it is, something to do with the tilt of the earth’s axis; Noah has no idea. He voices his thoughts to Sarah as they slowly make their way through the flood towards what looks like a hilltop in the distance.
“What, you missed the weather bulletin?” Sarah asks, sloshing another bottleful of water over the edge of the canoe and squinting up at the rain that plastered her hair in strings over her face. “Watch out for the freak storm that’s about to hit fucking everywhere. More news at ten.”
“Hey, I don’t know. I don’t pay attention,” Noah says.
She snorts.
They paddle on silently, under an endless expanse of dark grey sky that stretches on and on until it meets the lighter grey of the newly created ocean over the heartland of America. Around them, treetops bloom straight out of the water, most of their leaves torn off by the relentless downpour. In the south, distantly, Noah can make out the tops of buildings sticking out of the water like lifeless blocky islands. There is one building that might be a City Hall or something like that: windows are still visible, rows of black eyes with dull green borders in a brick face. He strains his eyes for signs of life within them, but he can see nothing. It doesn’t mean anything, of course — there could be people that he can’t see, or they could be staying away from the windows for fear of flooding.
“Steer straight,” Sarah calls. “There’s a tree up there that’s directly west; we’re heading towards that.”
Noah tears his eyes away from the empty windows and looks ahead, correcting their path from his position in the back of the canoe.
After three hours (according to his dying cell phone) his arms are aching with every stroke, and he can only imagine how Sarah must feel. His hands have the benefit of calluses built up by several seasons of rowing, but she has no such thing working to her advantage, in addition to not much experience rowing. Still, Noah will not be the first one to call for a rest. He has a reputation to uphold.
It takes another half an hour before Sarah lays her oar across her lap. Without turning around, she says, “We’re stopping now. Just for a little while. I need a break.”
“Yeah, okay. Whatever.” Noah speaks casually, hiding his relief. He mimics her pose, hands resting loose over the oar and shaking with the effort of staying open after being clenched for so long around the handle. The canoe drifts forwards, listing to the left without anything to dictate its course besides the sea. Noah lets his gaze roam out over the water. A branch floats by with a few leaves clinging to the surface of the water; he reaches out with his oar and prods it away. Something about the action strikes him as odd. Noah isn’t a particularly clever person, and he knows better than to try to drag thoughts kicking and screaming to the surface of his mind before they’re ready, so he shields his eyes and watches water run down Sarah’s back, waiting for the thought to arrive in its own time.
Debris, he thinks. In floods this high, there should be debris everywhere: branches, litter, leaves, junk that the waters have picked out of people’s yards and homes, maybe even — and he tries very hard not to dwell on this — bodies. Instead, the surface of the water is clear. A few branches, here and there, but nothing like the glut of garbage that the flood should have swept up to the surface. It makes him uneasy, sort of sick to his stomach.
&
SECOND DAY~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
“You write, don't you?” Noah asks, on the second day. After trying various configurations, many of which nearly ended in the capsizing of their fragile boat, they had settled on shoving everything really bulky towards the prow and stern of the boat, and curling up, back to back, in the middle. It was uncomfortable, and Noah's feet kept cramping – not to mention that rain still fell heavy on his face – but after what felt like half the night, he had finally been able to drift into an uneasy doze. If they kept this up another few days, he thought, he would eventually get so tired that he'd be able to fall asleep like this more easily, but he banished the thought. The entire continental United States wasn't as flat or as close to sea level as Oklahoma, and he and Sarah were fairly competent with the oars; they'd find land sooner rather than later.
“How did you know that?” Sarah asks,
“My mom would say. Oh, your cousin Sarah got published, Aunt Peggy says. Seventeen, and already a published author! What are you doing with your life, Noah?” His impression of his mom's voice is high and nasal, and his mom never actually spoke like that (speaks, present tense, speaks) but she could have. Lots of people do, and Sarah doesn't have to know.
Sarah sort-of laughs. They're still wet, and in a canoe, and she's probably putting too much effort into rowing to have breath left over for laughing, but it's a start. “She never did say that,” Sarah says. “Why would she tell your parents?”
“Probably because they're sisters, and she wanted to show you off. It's a big fucking deal.” Noah had read the story. It hadn't been his thing – some girly piece about going to Girl Scout camp and not needing a dude to feel validated – but he wasn't about to deny that it had been a good piece of writing.
“Hey.” Sarah stops rowing for a moment, letting the oar trail through the water. “You swore. I didn't know you swore.”
Noah hits her oar with his own to get her going again. He snorts. “Cause you always see me around my mom. You know how some people have, like, a swear jar? She'd just take my stuff away. You'd quit swearing real fast, too.”
'I see.' Sarah doesn't seem to know what to say to that, and Noah curses himself for not being able to keep up a conversation. On campus, he's known among his friends for being the life of the party, and now – now, when it really counts, when there's no one else to step in and take his place, and his sanity might depend on this conversation's continuing – he can't manage to not sound awkward. So he tries to steer the conversation back towards its intended direction.
“So anyway, like I was saying. You tell stories,” he says.
“Sometimes.” Sarah is scowling now, and he can't tell whether it's at him, or whether it's a grimace because they're still in a canoe and still drenched. He guesses it's a combination, which means that he might still have a shot.
“So tell a story. We don't have anything else to do,” he suggests.
“What are you, five? I tell bedtime stories to Jeanine,” Sarah says. She grunts and drags her oar through the water. Noah figures that it was worth a shot, and he is in the process of finding a line of conversation that might actually prove fruitful when she sighs and says, “Fine. What do you want a story about?”
“I don't know. Do you got any stories that take place in deserts? I could go for a desert right about now.”
“You don't say. Okay, here. I'm so tired that we'd probably end up in fucking Wonderland if I tried to make something up, so you get to hear an excerpt from The Arabian Nights.”
“All right.” Noah tries to infuse his voice with enthusiasm; he guesses that it's kind of like trying to come up with at least a ninety on a math test after your roommates kept you up all night partying: sometimes, that shit just doesn't come. “But if I don't like it, I reserve the right to cut off your head with every weapon available to me in this canoe.”
Sarah just rolls her eyes. “Yeah, all that beef jerky’s looking real threatening right about now. Jackass. So once upon a time, there was this man named Ali Baba.”
&
NINTH DAY~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
The ninth day dawns grey, with a lightness in the east that is the only indication that Noah has of the continued existence of the sun. He turns the boat around for a while and sits, shivering, watching the light spread and paddling gently to keep it in place. He guesses that it’s about seven o’clock in the morning, and a dull, cramping ache in his shoulders testifies to the fact that he has been paddling on and off since sundown. The skin on his fingers is raw and painful; the near-constant wet makes it easy for the calluses to rub off, and now the rain and the friction of the oar have conspired to start tearing at the already-tender skin underneath. It stings with every stroke, but he’s seen Sarah’s fingers in the precious few moments when they are awake at the same time, and is grateful that he had the initial calluses, and thus is only now starting to feel the sting.
He stops staring at the horizon, adjusts his hat, and starts to turn the canoe back west. It’s impossible to know how far they have gone, but, he figures, it would take an awful lot of water to cover the Rockies in their entirety. If they keep going west, sooner or later, they’ll find some sort of landmark, some destination.
They have to.
Noah wonders what happened to Joseph. He wonders whether they’ll find him floating in the water, eventually, him and his dog and his kayak. You’d think that a bright red kayak would be hard to miss, right?
“Is it my turn yet?”
Sarah’s sleepy voice drags him back to the present. He looks down, where she lies on top of their supplies at the bottom of the canoe, shielded from the rain by the tarp and a hat over her face. The hat is now tilted up by one pale, wet hand, and she winces at the dull light.
“Yeah, sure,” Noah says. He’s pretty sure that he could keep going for another hour or so, until the brightness that marked the sun was farther overheard, but it stopped being a point of pride to do more than his share right around the time he passed out from hunger on day five. “I’m beat.”
She props the hat up, and slides her legs from between his feet. The soggy remnants of her paperback novel slide to the bottom of the canoe, and the boat rocks as she reaches back to retrieve it. Noah grips the sides to steady himself while she picks herself up and settles back onto her seat. “Do I need to fish today, or did you leave me anything to eat?”
“Fishing today.”
Sarah looks out to her left, as though hoping for someone to come along and tell him that he was selfish and greedy for eating the last of the bass. Noah grits his teeth. He isn’t going to say anything, he isn’t going to rise to the bait; he is exhausted and sick to his stomach and he is still going to take the moral high ground. “I can stay up to fish and cook, and then go to sleep,” he offers.
She does roll her eyes, then. “No. I’ll kill you.”
Noah is about to tell her that she’s being really mature about this, and he’s trying to be decent, when he notices how dark the circles under her eyes have become, and the weary, resigned tone with which she announces this. Damn it, he thinks. “Okay. But wake me up if you need me to do anything, okay? I’m serious.”
“I’d say ‘when hell freezes over’, but …” Sarah glances around. “Looks like that might already have happened.”
“Nah, that’s not gonna happen now. It’s probably flooded, and you know how the ocean doesn’t freeze at the bottom because it’s too deep, it’s probably like that. It couldn’t freeze in hell even if pigs started to fly,” Noah tells her, dragging the information from a part of his brain that it feels like he hasn’t used in years, instead of a *little over two weeks.
They both look skyward, and Noah has to blink and squint and rub raindrops out of his eyes.
“That’s comforting,” Sarah says finally. “Just … go to sleep, okay?”
“Yep.” Noah passes her the oar, and yawns. He slides off of his seat, and oh god, his butt is sore. In the back of his mind, he remembers something about bedsores, about how paralyzed people need to be moved around so that they don’t get sores, and he hopes like hell that sitting in a canoe for days on end isn’t enough to give him any. That’s the last thing he needs. He kicks Sarah’s ankles until she gives him enough room to lie down, and accepts the tarp to drag over himself. As far as blankets go, it is without a doubt the worst one that he has ever used — and that includes the one that his best friend in high school lent to him, the one that gave him lice and hadn’t been washed for a length of time that even Noah agreed was unsanitary — but maybe, if he keeps really still, then he’ll be able to dry off a little bit before he wakes up. He pulls the hat down over his face, leans his head back against the plastic bag that still keeps Grandma’s quilt dry, and shuts his eyes.
As he lets the uneven rocking of the canoe lull him to sleep, he thinks about Grandpa telling everyone about how to sleep in a hammock on a Navy battleship during a storm. He folds his arms across his chest and grips the edges of the tarp. I wonder if this is anything like that, he thinks, before exhaustion claims him, and he falls asleep.
&
TWELFTH DAY~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
When he wakes up on the afternoon of the twelfth day, it is from a frenzied dream in which he runs a race around a neon green track in competition with his elementary school gym teacher, and it is to the sound of Sarah sobbing. Noah forces himself to lie still for a moment, smelling the stale, sour inside of his hat, and listening. It could be that he’s misheard, it could be that she’s laughing, or that she has the hiccups, or a million other things. So he lies on his back and holds his fingers curled lightly around the tarp as they had been when he was roused, and listens. At first, the din of the rain clattering on the tarp distracts him, but he pushes past it, straining his ears, until he hears a shuddering intake of breath, followed by choked-off groan.
Sarah is crying. Noah shuts his eyes again, goading his mind into gear. Think, Noah, think, why is your cousin crying, what do you do, do you ‘wake up’ and try to help and fail, and feel awkward about it and there’s nowhere to go if she decides that you suck at comforting, which you do by the way, or do you stay asleep and hope she’s done by the time your turn with the oar comes around, that’s a better idea, let’s do that, and Noah is about to do just that when he hears Sarah say, barely audible over the rain, “Noah.”
He twitches at the sound of his name, so it’s no good pretending anymore. Noah pushes his hat back onto his head, instead of his face, and slides up and out from under the tarp.
Sarah is sitting across from him, oar laid across her lap and head bowed. She jerks her head up when he moves, and he realizes, belatedly, that maybe she didn’t see him after all — until now, that is. “Oh,” she says, sounding surprised.
Noah leans on his elbows with the edge of the seat digging into his back. Her eyes are puffy, though he can’t tell whether her cheeks are red in the waning afternoon light. He doesn’t know what to say; they’ve hardly spoken to each other in days, emotional distance being the only kind of distance that they can afford under the circumstances, and it’s not as though they have ever been close: he can count on one hand the number of times that they have even been under the same roof since Sarah was born. And now they are sharing a canoe, and he watches her try to avoid his gaze.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she demands, finally.
“I’m tired,” he says, because it’s true and it is easy.
“Go back to sleep, then,” she snaps.
Reverse psychology. Noah knows this one. He rubs his eyes and sits up all the way, shedding the tarp and clasping his hands on his knees. “I’m not. What’s the matter?”
Sarah swallows another shuddering cry, and waves a hand around at them. “We’re in the middle of a fucking ocean, dumbass.”
Noah looks around, even though he has the view memorized by now. “I know.”
“So? That’s it. Go back to sleep.” Sarah scrubs her face with her wrist, for all the good that it does her; it simply means that rainwater is what gets in her eyes, rather than tears.
Noah takes a deep breath. This is the last thing that he wants to do — he would much rather take her advice, and try to sleep for another few hours before it’s his turn to paddle — but he is stranded within three feet of this girl for the foreseeable future, and she is his family. Possibly the only family he has left. He owes it to her to try. “Listen … if you want to talk about whatever it is … I’m not going anywhere. You can talk to me.”
Sarah glares at him; for several long, uncomfortable moments, the only sound in the world is that of rain bouncing off of the canoe and hitting the sea around them. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” Noah breathes a mental sigh of relief, even though he knows he has to plow ahead anyway. He has to try, at least. “Is there … do you want me to do anything? Besides go back to sleep, I know you want me to do that already.”
She covers her face with her hands. In putting them to her face, she releases the oar, which starts to slide, paddle first, into the sea. Noah lunges across the boat to grab it before it is lost to the waters forever. The canoe rocks with the motion, but not enough to capsize them; just enough that they both have to seize the sides of the canoe to prevent themselves from losing balance. When Sarah does so, Noah can see that her eyes have filled with fresh tears.
“Thanks,” she says, voice breaking as she takes back the paddle. “Fuck. Fuck.” As they sit back and settle down again, she plunges her oar into the swirling waters and pushes them forwards with a strained, savage motion. It does little but set them on a northwest course, and Noah hastens to correct them because if they get off course now, then there is no telling where they might end up, and they can’t afford to make navigational mistakes by giving in to whims like that.
“Jesus,” Noah says.
“Noah.” His name in her mouth comes out sharp and brittle. “Shut up. You want to know why I was crying? I am crying because this is not okay. I have not been dry in nearly two weeks. We are living off of fish that is either charred or raw, and I’m sick of it. I want a real bed, I want food that doesn’t taste like shit, I want to stand up and walk around, and I want it to stop. Raining.” Her voice rises to a scream as she finishes, chest heaving. Noah stares at her. “I could deal with everything else. I could deal with being trapped on a motherfucking canoe. But I can’t stand that we have to bail the canoe out every few hours or else it overflows; I can’t stand that we have to hover right the fuck over the fire to keep it going; and I wouldn’t care that we’re surrounded by motherfucking Atlantis right now, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m pretty sure that if it wasn’t raining, then maybe my skin would get a chance to dry out, instead of peeling off in chunks! It’s disgusting!” She sets her oar between her knees, so that it won’t fall this time as she shakes her hands in the air and lets out a frustrated shout.
&
FOURTEENTH DAY~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
Noah dreams that he is deaf. He runs down the street in his hometown, knocking on doors and shouting uselessly at everyone, but the only sound is his voice pounding in his ears while their mouths open and close like goldfish. It's nightmarish, and he is grateful beyond measure when someone kicks his shin. Then he stops to wonder why he's curled into an uncomfortable ball, with someone else in his bed at that angle. He supposes that he's in his dorm room on Long Island, not at home after all, cramped in his bed against someone else because one or more of his off-campus friends got too drunk to drive home. He's guessing that it's Danny, who never learned his limits even after that time he nearly got suspended, and if Danny's here then there's a high probability that Noah is cramped and squashed against the headboard, head pillowed on his dresser, because Danny's boyfriend is occupying the foot of the bed, curled around Danny's car keys as an added preventative measure. Noah opens his eyes to make sure, and alsoto say hello because he's quite fond of both of them even if they're currently giving him back problems.
When he see the clouds over his head, he is momentarily confused; then he shuts his eyes again, and grief washes over him, pressing down and turning his limbs to lead. He curls in even more tightly on himself, tucking his head in as far as it will go in the hopes that he'll wake up a second time, the way that he sometimes does: nightmares within nightmares within more innocuous dreams. Failing that, maybe he can just go back to sleep.
"Noah," Sarah whispers. "Noah, listen."
"Shut up," he mumbles, covering his face with his hands.
"No, no, no, Noah. Listen. Get up. It's stopped raining."
Danny is dead, Noah thinks, All of my friends are dead, and then, What? He takes his hands away from his face and, reluctantly, looks heavenward again. There is no moon, and no stars, still hidden behind thick layers of cloud, but no ceaseless patter of raindrops on his face, either. He takes in a cautious breath, afraid that if he so much as breathes too loudly, it will shake the rain loose from the firmament and bring it down upon them once more.
