Hundred year flood. That’s what started it all. It was long before I was born. My dad was a kid when it happened. They lost their house. He doesn’t remember much - grandma and grandpa sent him to stay with some friends that were up on higher ground when the rain kept coming and coming. He has vague memories of being bored out of his mind and the adults coming and going, talking to each other in hushed voices. He remembers the woman - grandma’s friend - cooking for what felt like all day, saying that the food was going to the churches and the community center and everywhere else that people were staying who had lost their homes.

Then grandma and grandpa came back for him and he found out there was no home to go back to.

They lived in a rental for a bit over a year in the next town over. It was a hard year, he said, as he was going to a different school and didn’t know anyone. But they were lucky. They got a new house and moved back. Lots of families that went away just… never returned. The town shrank after the flood and while the population eventually recovered as new families moved in, it lost a lot of the people that remembered what happened.

Grandma died seven years ago. Grandpa died five years ago. And dad - well, he was only a kid. Mom certainly doesn’t remember anything because she isn’t from here. They met in college and when he wanted to move back home to be close to his family, she agreed. She certainly didn’t want to be near her family. I still haven’t met my maternal grandparents. Don’t even know if they’re still alive. Mom doesn’t talk about it.

I didn’t particularly want to come back here. It’s a small town and there’s not a lot going on around it. Just flat, open fields of corn and soybeans. The river, of course, but it's not very exciting either. Every bit as flat as the terrain around it, meandering back and forth in gentle curves until it passes through the center of town. People go kayaking on it in the summer, but that’s the extent of its relevance to the town. Other than the flood, of course. The hundred year flood that barely anyone remembers.

This was more a town for established families. Young couples ready to settle down and have their first child and maybe a few more. People like my parents who had roots here and were looking towards retirement. It wasn’t the place for someone fresh out of college and wanting to start a career. But when dad got his diagnosis I had to reconsider what my priorities were. He protested, of course, but I knew how to spin it. It wouldn’t be that long, I said. Half a year. Plenty of people take a short break after college to go on some dream trip or something before finding a job. I wasn’t flying overseas to backpack across Europe or anything exciting like that, I said, but it would still be like a vacation. A staycation. A staycation at my parent’s house in my old bedroom with the occasional trip to the hospital for dad’s chemotherapy appointments.

None of us were particularly afraid. The oncologist had said ‘curable.’ Not ‘treatable.’ Curable. It’s an important difference. So we would go to the appointments and this was going to be hard but it was just one small part of our lives and we’d get through it and everything would keep going after that. That’s what I told myself. This was just a pause.

Still, it felt weird to be moving my belongings back into my old bedroom. I was going to move to Seattle. I’d already picked out a couple of rentals I could afford for a few months while I searched for a job. They weren’t in the city, but they were close enough and I could always move to someplace nicer once I was more stable. Instead, I found myself standing on the creaky wooden floor of my old bedroom, staring at the narrow twin bed I’d spent most of my life sleeping in. My parents had started using the bedroom as storage and half of the room was lined with boxes that used to be in the basement. Dad didn’t like keeping things in the basement, not after losing everything he ever owned in the flood as a child.

“We can move those back,” my mom said apologetically as I surveyed the mess.

“I’ll move them,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Don’t you need to be looking for jobs though?”

“That’s not going to take all day. I’m going to put in like three hours worth of submitting applications and then the rest of the time is going to be spent helping out around here, okay?”

She thinned her lips like she did when she wasn’t happy but didn’t think it was worth disagreeing. I’d long since grown immune to feeling any guilt when this happened. This was what I wanted to do and I was going to do it.

“I don’t want the boxes in the basement.”

My father materialized behind her in the doorway. He hadn’t started chemo yet, but he was already wearing a blue surgical mask. He didn’t want anything getting in the way of his treatment. I’d need to start wearing one soon as well, I thought.

“I’ll move them back out when I leave,” I promised.

“Have you looked at the weather? It’s going to rain all next week. This house shouldn’t even have a basement. None of the houses around here should have basements.”

“They have basements because of the tornado risk,” my mom sighed.

This was an old argument. My dad seemed to be picking a lot of fights over the same things again and again lately. I suspected it served as a distraction from the cancer.

“When’s the last time we had a tornado around here?” he asked.

But he was already walking off down the hallway. My mom’s voice drifted after him as she followed him, leaving me to do what I wanted with the boxes and to get my own things unpacked.

“When’s the last time we had a flood?” I muttered, hefting the first of the boxes.

I swear, they were all full of dishware and probably weighed 50 lbs each. I lugged them back to a vacant corner of the basement that I assumed used to be where they resided. There was an odd smell down there that took me a while to place. At first I thought it was mold and I searched the corners and walls and turned the flashlight on my phone and carefully examined the ceiling. There wasn’t a drop of moisture that I could find, which was a relief. The last thing my parents needed to be dealing with right now on top of dad’s diagnosis was water damage.

With the last box downstairs, I paused to take a couple deep breaths in one last attempt to identify the smell. It wasn’t musty, I thought. No mold or mildew. It reminded me of the outdoors, but not quite like a summer day or being in a forested area. Something else.

It struck me as I went upstairs. Hay, I thought. It smelled like hay.

​

I didn’t think much about it. Not until almost a week later, after dad’s first chemotherapy appointment. It was later in the day and mom and I were taking care of the evening chores. All that was left was running the trash out to the bin. Mom had already taken the trash out to the curb, but the kitchen trash had filled up since then, and she didn’t want dad to try to take it out because it was raining. It’d been raining since yesterday. Just a steady rain, the kind that saturated the ground and backed up storm drains. It should stop sometime in the night, according to the forecast. I put on a jacket and headed outside.

Sunset had come early on account of the overhead clouds, but it wasn’t dark enough for the street lights to come on yet. There was a foul smell in the air, lingering over the scent of damp earth, and I wrinkled my nose. Surely it wasn’t the trash. I lifted the lid of the bin, tossed the bag in, and then saw the source of it a short distance away.

Poop. There was poop on the sidewalk. A big pile of it. Some animal had come by and pooped in front of our house.

“Gross,” I muttered.

At least the rain would wash it away.

Dad was waiting in the entryway when I came back in. He shuffled over and reached for my jacket, so I turned around to let him take it off and put it away. Even cancer-stricken, he wanted to be a gentleman sometimes.

“Mom didn’t like it when I went out in the rain,” he said, shaking the water off my jacket. “She’d get real upset and tell me I wasn’t allowed out.”

“Did she not want you getting wet or something?” I asked.

“No, I mean she’d be really upset.” He frowned. “Sometimes she’d cry.”

That startled me. Grandma always seemed very grounded to me. Like a mountain that could weather anything. She was resilient. She didn’t get angry very often and when she did, it was more a quiet disappointment that felt even worse than being screamed at. I’d never experienced it, thank goodness. But crying? I couldn’t imagine my grandmother crying.

“Well, someone is out in the rain,” I said grouchily. “They let their dog poop on your sidewalk.”

My dad suddenly came to life. He tapped into that energy that the chemotherapy hadn’t begun to erode yet.

“I know who that is!” he exclaimed. “Here - let me get a paper bag. We’ll scoop it up and leave it on their front porch.”

“No you won’t!”

My mother’s voice came from somewhere upstairs. Clearly I’d found another one of their long-standing disagreements. But dad was already rummaging in the pantry.

“It’s probably nice and soggy too,” he said gleefully. “I hope the bag falls apart when they pick it up and it falls on their foot. I don’t understand why they can’t just pick it up like they’re supposed to. Their dog isn’t even that big.”

Well at least this gave me a way to head dad off from his plan of petty revenge.

“I don't think it’s them, if it’s a small dog,” I said. “It was… huge. Like. It looks like horse poop, honestly.”

He paused. He’d found the paper bags, unfortunately. I had to talk him out of this quickly.

“No horses around here anymore,” he finally said. “Had to be a dog. Not sure who owns a dog that big.”

“It’s fine, the rain will wash it away,” I said. “Besides, mom doesn’t want you going out in the rain.”

She was still yelling from upstairs. Neither of us were really listening to her at this point, but I think that was the gist of what she was saying. Dad sighed and put the bags back.

“Okay, but if you see them letting their dog poop out there,” he said, “do me a favor and throw it back onto their front porch, okay?”

I lied and said I would.

​

I was starting to hate the boxes in the basement. Dad was growing increasingly more obsessed with them. It was the chemo, mom said. It was stressful and he didn’t feel well and he was finding other things to be concerned about. It wasn’t logical, but none of what was happening to our family made sense anymore. We just had to get through it and in the meantime, if it made dad feel better to do something about the basement, then we’d just go along with it. She’d rent a storage unit if she had to, if that made him stop fretting about it.

She was afraid he’d go down there and start unpacking them himself. I was afraid of the same thing. The last thing I wanted was my cancer-stricken father carrying 50 lbs of plates and bowls up and down the stairs. So after I finished sending out some job applications and scheduling interviews from the few replies I’d gotten, I went down into the basement with a box knife to see what was inside them.

As expected, there were a lot of plates. I set most of them aside in a ‘to get rid of’ pile. There was a green-tinted glass serving platter that I set aside to check if it was some kind of vintage or antique that might be worth saving. Then, three boxes of dishware down, I got to the photo albums.

They weren’t in great shape. The plastic cover for each page had fused with the faint layer of glue. I flipped through a handful of them, seeing photos of my birthday parties and my first ballet recital. They appeared to be in chronological order so I dug deeper, curious to see how far back they went. The photos grew steadily more washed out, the colors fading and finally turning into sepia tones. I finally paused on a page containing photos of my grandmother as a much younger woman, her hair dark and curly, holding a toddler on her knee. I eased the plastic off the page and pried the photo off with the tip of the knife. I checked the back. My dad was a little obsessive with writing dates on things and sure enough, I found his handwriting on the back with a year. He would have been three in this photo, by my math.

I took the album upstairs with me and found mom.

“We need to do something about these,” I said, flipping it open. “Look. The page protectors are starting to break down and I’m worried they’ll damage the photos.”

“Oh. Yeah, we should store them in something else. How many did you find?”

“Lots.”

She took the photo of grandma when I handed it to her.

“Who is that lady behind the couch?” I asked.

She was leaning over the back, smiling broadly and staring at my dad. Her hair was chestnut in color, short and curly.

“I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask your dad? He might be awake.”

I took the photo upstairs with me. I put on one of the surgical masks we left hanging on the doorknob to dad’s bedroom before pushing the door open. They’d turned the office into an additional bedroom, putting a bed in there before I showed up so dad could isolate when he wasn’t feeling well or sleep without being disturbed by anyone else in the family. He was indeed awake, sitting propped up in bed and listlessly watching something on the TV. He looked inhumanely pale in the lurid glare of the screen and I averted my eyes.

I didn’t like seeing him like that.

“I found this photo in the basement,” I said. “Can I turn the lights on?”

He nodded, not really taking his eyes off the TV. I flipped the switch and walked over, sitting down on the chair next to the bed. Just a few more months, I thought. A few more months and he’d be done with this.

“Who is this?” I asked.

I pointed at the woman in the photo. He took the photo from me and stared at her for a long time.

“I think that’s my aunt,” he finally said. “I don’t remember her that well. She died when I was young.”

He lay his hand back down on the bed. I waited a few minutes as he stared at the TV, waiting to see if he’d remember anything else. Then I noticed the steady rise and fall of his chest. He’d fallen asleep again. Probably for the best. I quietly took the photo, turned out the lights, and left him to sleep.

After that, I started setting aside photos of her when I found them. I didn’t know my dad had an aunt. It was understandable that he didn’t talk much about her, if he didn’t remember her that well, and if she’d died young then it was likely grandma didn’t want to bring it up. Still, she fascinated me. She always looked so happy in the photos. I found a couple of her with horses, leading them by the reins with my dad in the saddle. I asked him if he remembered the horses and he didn’t, but he said there used to be a horse farm not far from where they lived. I drove by there one afternoon to see if I could see the horses or maybe recognize the big oak tree in the background of some of the photos. Instead, I found some empty posts where a sign might have once been, a gate, and ‘no trespassing’ signs.

“Oh yeah, the farm shut down,” dad said when I told him about it. “They sold that property long ago and the people that own it now aren’t that friendly. Dad told me as a kid I wasn’t allowed to go over there and I’d be grounded for life if I did.”

Grandpa wasn’t mean. My dad was just… a handful as a child, as I understood it.

The threat hadn’t stopped my dad. He’d gone there anyway and hopped the fence and looked around. He’d found the horse barn, but it had collapsed by then, and was nothing more than sagging walls and a flattened roof. The entire thing had smelled of rotting hay. He hadn’t gone back after that. There wasn’t much to see. Just an empty field and a dilapidated building.

​

After that it began to rain in earnest. We were halfway through dad’s treatment. He slept a lot and when he was awake, he told long, rambling stories from his childhood. I thought it was the rain that was doing it. It seemed to make him remember his mom and her dire warnings to stay inside. He mentioned it often, shaking his head and saying it was the only time she was ever really strict with him. No going outside, he said. That was her thing.

The flood must have been traumatic for them, I thought.

It was starting to look like it might flood again. I didn’t walk down to the bridge anymore, but when we drove past I saw the city had erected barriers. It was getting close to the bottom of the bridge. Mom didn’t say anything about it, but I saw her glancing nervously at it. I don’t think dad noticed at all. He was usually trying not to throw up on the way back from chemo.

After about three days of constant downpour, the rain stopped. Its absence was so stark that it woke me up in the night. For a moment I was disoriented by the uncanny silence until I realized that I could no longer hear the raindrops beating against my window. I lay wide awake in my bed, listening to the quiet outside and the beating of my own heart. Then the night was punctured by a shrill noise, distant and unfamiliar. Some kind of animal, I thought. Maybe a coyote. There were plenty of those around here. Then another cry, and another right after it. I sat up in bed.

Maybe it wasn’t as far away as it sounded, I thought. I could feel my breathing and heart speeding up, some instinctual part of my body growing alarmed at the noise. It was fine, I told myself. I was inside. It was nothing. I took a deep breath.

In fact, I thought, it might just be the TV. Dad had taken to falling asleep with it on. Mom sometimes turned it off during the night, but I always slept through it. I got out of bed, trying to walk softly so that the floor wouldn’t creak, and entered the hallway. I crept into dad’s room, putting on my mask first to be safe. The TV was on and I couldn’t see much in the sudden glare, my eyes slow to adjust. I fumbled around for the remote and turned the power off.

The screams continued. That’s what they were, I realized. Some kind of animal screaming.

It wasn’t coming from the TV, either.

And dad wasn’t asleep in his bed. It was empty.

Anxiously, I hurried from the room. I glanced into the master bedroom where my mom was still asleep before I descended the stairs. The cries were louder now. They were growing closer.

I found dad in the entryway. He was looking outside through the windows to either side of the front door. I came over to stand next to him, looking outside at the street. There was a haze in the air, thick coils of fog wrapping around the nearby houses and turning them into hunkered shadows in the night, indistinct and ominous.

“Mom always said I couldn’t go out when it rained,” he whispered. “Honestly, I didn’t want to go out there. Not when it rained like this.”

“Because of the flood?” I ventured.

“I remember screaming,” he said faintly. “There was always screaming when it rained. Only I heard it.”

There was a current of water in the street. It lapped at the edges of the curb, roiling past the tires of parked cars, and continued on and out of sight. Like the river, I thought. It reminded me of the river.

Then it started to rain again, returning in a violent curtain of water, and the cries were drowned out in the thunderous downpour.

​

It began to feel like dad was made of glass. He wore layers because he was cold and it was like the clothing swallowed him up. It felt like he’d shatter at any moment and all those shirts and jackets were just padding so nothing could hurt him. Mom and I worried a lot, in quiet, when he wasn’t within earshot. She marked the days off on the calendar, counting down until he was done with his chemotherapy. We were over halfway done, she’d say. Almost there.

Then one evening, I called for dad to come down for dinner and he didn’t. After about ten minutes of waiting, I went up to check on him, thinking that maybe his TV was up too loud. He wasn’t really watching anything he enjoyed most of the time. It was just something to keep himself distracted.

But he wasn’t in his room. I went back down and told mom, who sighed dramatically and asked if I’d check the basement. Maybe he was obsessing over those boxes again, she said. He’d better not be trying to lift them. With that grim warning hanging over my head, I headed down into the basement, hoping he wouldn’t be down there. I didn’t want to be around that particular argument between them.

The smell of hay hit me when I stepped off the stairs. It was almost overwhelming. This time, it smelled musty, with a faint hint of mildew. I felt sick inhaling it. I navigated around the shelves and stacks of boxes, looking for either my dad or some evidence of a leak. Dad wasn’t down here, but I took my time inspecting the walls. We had been getting a lot of rain lately and I didn’t want to overlook any problems.

I’d just finished a lap of the basement when I paused by the windows. They were narrow slits at the top of the wall, just barely above the ground level on the outside of the house. Very little light came in through them with the storm clouds overhead, but it was making strange patterns on the ground. I stared at it for a second, watching as the faint traces of remote sunlight swayed across my shoes.

Like I was underwater.

Startled, I jerked my gaze up to the window.

Water. There was water covering them.

I ran up the stairs. I didn’t say anything to mom, I just ran out through the back door and to the side of the house. The grass squished and gave under my feet, but when I rounded the corner, I didn’t see any standing water. The windows were fine. The ground was saturated, but we weren’t flooding. Not yet.

“Is everything okay?” mom asked when I came back in.

“Yeah, I thought I saw something outside,” I replied as I wiped my feet dry.

What had I seen? I wasn’t sure anymore.

“I looked in the garage,” mom said. “The car is gone.”

Dad had left the house. There was no reason he couldn’t obviously, he was a grown man. And sure, he was exhausted all the time, but that was the chemo and if he felt strong enough to run an errand then why shouldn’t he? I saw the worry in mom’s face, though. He hadn’t told any of us. He’d been acting a little erratically since the cancer treatments had started.

I gave up on drying my shoes and went to the hallway to get my jacket.

“I’ll go see if I can find him,” I offered. “Call me if he comes home.”

I checked the grocery store. The nearby gas station. I went to the dollar store. I checked every place I thought that someone bored and anxious for a quick change of scenery might visit. Nothing. There weren’t many cars in the parking lots, on account of the weather, and their car wasn’t among them. Then I had a thought. I called mom and asked what the address to dad’s childhood home had been. He’d been reminiscing a lot, I said, and perhaps he’d gone there.

I had to drive slowly, for there was standing water in the road leading to the old house. The neighborhood was sorely neglected. There were some houses, but most of them were vacant and had signs attached to the doors indicating they were condemned. This area had never recovered from the flood and no one was trying to rebuild it. It’d been abandoned. I felt that was understandable, considering how badly the road was flooding already. I eased the car up out of the water and into the crumbling driveway. Dad’s car was there. And dad was standing at the edge of the driveway, staring at the concrete foundation that was all that remained of his childhood home.

He looked so small in the rain. Like a sand castle being slowly washed away. I felt like if I waited too long, he’d simply dissolve and drift away in the run-off.

I got out of the car and walked over with an umbrella. He was shivering underneath his raincoat. Had my dad always been this thin? Had I just not noticed the chemotherapy eating him away in tiny slivers?

“Mom is worried,” I said, standing next to him, staring at the empty plot of dirt and young trees that were slowly reclaiming where his house had once stood. They swam in growing puddles of standing water.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just had a sudden idea to come out here. I’ve been thinking about death a lot.”

“You’re not going to die,” I said firmly.

“I know. Only one month left. But I don’t know, something like this… it just makes you think about it.”

But why here? Why the old house? I licked my lips nervously.

“What happened to your aunt?” I asked.

“She drowned. Dad told me when I was in college.”

“During the flood?”

“During the flood.”

She was helping his parents get some things from the house before it completely flooded, he said. They weren’t able to save a lot because the water was rising too fast and they were afraid of being trapped inside. So they’d given up after only a few trips and were about to leave when his aunt had heard something.

The horses. They were still in their barn and the river was consuming the pastures.

His aunt went to free them. And perhaps she succeeded, he said, for they found her body some distance from the horse barn. They’d made it out of the pasures, even. But at some point, they’d possibly been cut off, and his aunt had been swept away and drowned. They found her body caught on a tree when the waters receded. They never found the bodies of the horses.

“We should go home,” I said. “Mom is keeping dinner warm.”

“I’m not hungry anymore.”

“I know.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I hugged his shoulders and we stood there for a bit until he began to shiver. Then he reluctantly went back to his car, saying he’d better at least try to eat or mom would be sad. I waited a moment, glancing back over the remains of his home one last time, and then followed in my own car.

He was thinking about death. I understood - logically - why, but it still bothered me. All I wanted to think about was his last day of treatment and when this would all be over. It was like our entire lives had been put on pause and I was holding my breath and waiting for everything to start moving again.

I glanced at the vacant houses as we drove slowly past them. Like driving through a cemetery of lives uprooted, I thought. Little wonder dad came here if he was in a morbid mood.

Then I slammed on the brakes.

Someone was staring at me through one of the windows. The condemned notification fluttered on the door, the ink faded into near illegibility.

A pale face with dark hair. I couldn’t make out anything else through the rain.

Then I saw dad’s brakelights up ahead as he stopped to wait for me. I glanced at them, then glanced back at the building.

The face was gone. I kept driving.

​

We had a few weeks of sunshine and dad’s chemotherapy progressed. It was a small town, but it was still big enough to have its own hospital, not far from downtown. They only allowed one person back with the patient, so mom would go with dad and I’d take a walk. The hospital was close to main street that stretched all the way through downtown. A bridge went over the river and I’d walk down there, watch the water for a little bit, and then walk back. I began to notice that even with the sunshine, the river wasn’t receding. It was still raining upstream, one of the locals commented one day, when we were both staring over the edge of the bridge and into the water. He hadn’t seen it this high in a long time.

He was older than my dad, so I asked him about the flood.

“Lot of people lost their houses,” he said, sucking his teeth. “Then there was that business with the horses.”

“I think that was my great aunt,” I said.

“Oh!” He looked at me closer. “I remember you now. Didn’t recognize you all grown up.”

I had no idea who this man was but clearly he remembered me as a child. It was an uncomfortable feeling and I concentrated on the river instead, watching the water churn as it passed beneath the bridge.

“They say you can see them,” he said. “Look.”

He pointed at the water, where it turned into a white froth at the bridge supports. I squinted, unsure of what I was looking at.

Something dark. Something dark in the water. Then a hard edge broke the water’s surface and I saw a black, vacant hole like an eye and the ivory of bone. A flash of teeth and a distant, shrill sound, like the wind or like a scream from a rotting throat. I thought of my dad, swallowing his soup, his skin stretched tight like plastic wrap over his esophagus. Then the creature vanished beneath the water again.

“They’ve come back,” the man said. “It’s going to flood again. Just you wait and see. And tell your parents I said ‘hi’.”

Then he walked off and I didn’t want to call after him and ask who the hell he was. I just wanted to leave.

I stopped walking past the bridge after that.

​

As the old man had predicted, it started raining again. And it began to flood. We saw on the news that the river had overflowed the bridge and they were asking people to evacuate the downtown area. Dad grumbled about the basement and I silently went to carry the remaining boxes upstairs without really knowing where to put them. Whatever made him feel better, because mom’s assurances that this house was well out of the flood zone wasn’t doing much to calm him.

A hundred year flood. We were in a hundred year flood.

There wasn’t a lot we could do but wait. We still had to make it to dad’s chemotherapy appointments, but we couldn’t take the bridge through downtown anymore. We had to drive around instead, out to the highway and then back. It took an hour and on the way back dad would groan and turn a sickly green color as he struggled with nausea for the duration of the long drive. I didn’t have anywhere to take walks now, so I sat in the waiting room with my mask on. I could stay with dad for a little bit, while they got him ready, but then when they took him back I’d have to leave. That was how I was there the day they couldn’t find his vein and kept trying and trying. I saw the blood spots spreading underneath his skin and then when they finally got the IV in, I quietly excused myself, telling my dad cheerfully that I’d see him when he was done.

I started crying as soon as I left. I couldn’t stay here, I thought desperately. I couldn’t just sit here and cry and think about how the chemo was eating up my dad and we could only hope it killed the cancer faster than it killed him. So I left. I left the hospital and started walking.

It was drizzling, but not heavy enough that I needed an umbrella. I walked down main street to the edge of the flood. The surface of the water was placid, moving sluggishly among the buildings. Like a giant puddle, I thought. Just a giant puddle, like the kind I’d splash around in when I was a kid.

The water was to my ankles before I realized that my body was still moving. I paused, confused, staring down at my shoes that were barely visible beneath the murky water. What was I doing, standing here like this?

Then I looked up and there he was. Dad. My heart skipped a beat. His back was to me and he was walking into the water. I hurriedly waded after him, the floodwater growing deeper with every step. It splashed noisily around my knees and I called to him, yelling that he needed to go back, that the nurses were probably wondering where he’d gone. That it was okay, that he’d finish his chemo and everything would go back to normal and we’d all just move on from this long, horrible nightmare.

But he kept walking. And I kept going, until the water was up to my waist. Only then did I pause and so did he. He stood there and it was like his body was the same color as the water, his dark and curly hair the only bright spot on its muddy surface.

It was like I was in a dream and I couldn’t wake up. This didn’t seem right. His hair. His dark and curly hair. The chemo had taken his hair already. He was bald now.

This wasn’t my dad. My dad was back at the hospital with an IV pumping medicine into his body.

They turned to look at me. Their hair was the same color as my dad’s had been and it was curly like his, but it was a woman and her skin was flush with color and the chemotherapy hadn’t eaten away at her cheeks and left her as nothing but a bundle of bones.

She looked frightened. The water was at her chest. I reached out my hand to her, opening my mouth to call to her and tell her to come towards me, but nothing came out. Then the water turned turbulent around her, the tops forming white peaks, and her entire body jerked to one side. She toppled, into the water, and vanished beneath its murky surface.

It was like the dream was broken. I screamed. I waded into the water, thrashing desperately towards where she’d been. It was past my waist now. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t go further. I might get swept away too. But where was she? Where had she gotten swept away to?

Then something hit my legs. Something large. My knees crumpled and I went backwards into the water.

I righted myself just as quickly as I’d fallen, getting my head above water, but the current had quickly carried me deeper into the river’s grasp. I couldn’t find the ground beneath me anymore. I flailed, trying to grab hold of something - anything - as I struggled to find the ground with my toes. I could feel the tips of my shoes scraping pavement. I just wasn’t quite tall enough.

Inexorably, the water drew me towards the center of the river and the churning current that overwhelmed the bridge. Where I’d seen entire trees being dragged down underneath the water the day prior on the news.

Frantically, I tried to swim, tried to direct myself in a different direction. I was so small though, so small and weak against the water’s pull. It felt like I couldn’t breathe and I thought that this couldn’t be happening, that I couldn’t drown when we were so close to being done with all of this, when we were so close to finishing his treatment and slipping through death’s fingers and escaping.

But the river was in control now and my arms and legs were burning with exertion. I could barely keep my head above the surface of the churning water.

Then my hands touched something. Something solid. I grasped at it, found that it was broad, and I threw my arm around it.

It surged up, breaking through the surface of the water next to me.

A horse. My arm was wrapped around the neck of a horse.

It rolled its head to look at me and I expected to see eyes wild with terror, lips peeled back in its frenzy. I stared instead into empty eye sockets, the flesh peeling back from the bone in shades of gray and green. Tiny holes dotted its sagging cheeks, little pinpricks where worms burrowed their tunnels into its decaying muscle. Its teeth were bared because the lips had long ago sloughed off. And where my arm touched it, where my fingers dug into its neck in a desperate attempt to find something solid to cling to, the flesh gave. I felt cold liquid spilling out from where the skin tore open, as cold as the water around me.

The water churned all around me. More heads broke the surface, their manes falling out, their ears missing, and their empty eye sockets turning towards the sky and the rain falling overhead. They clustered tight around me, their bodies bumping into mine, and their legs thrashed at the water, desperately trying to keep their heads aloft.

The herd, I realized. The herd that drowned. They were still trying to escape the flood waters.

I heard the noise of an engine from somewhere behind me. I twisted, still holding tight to the horse’s neck. Two inflatable boats were heading towards me. I raised an arm and waved at them, yelling, and one of the men in a bright life vest waved back. They saw me. They were coming.

The horses sank below the waters just before they reached me. I watched their skulls vanish into the water, I felt the firm pressure of one of them as it slipped underneath me, putting its back under my feet, and with one last push it shoved me up out of the flood and into the boat. My great-aunt had tried to save them, so long ago, and now they were trying to save me.

Hands grabbed my arms and shirt and they heaved me the rest of the way in and I sat there in a soaking, shaking heap among the rescue team.

“There was a woman,” I cried. “She was in the water so I was trying to get to her and bring her back, but she got pulled under. I was trying to reach her when I lost my footing.”

One of the men spoke into a radio. The other boat broke off and began piloting downriver, following the current and the direction I pointed in. They’d look for her, my rescuers promised. They’d get me to safety in the meantime.

“No one saw anyone else, though,” someone said. “We got the call when you were swept away but they didn’t say anything about anyone else.”

“She was there. I saw her.”

“We’ll keep looking.”

They wouldn’t find her, I realized. She was as trapped here in the waters as the horses were. Trying to reach them. Trying to save them.

“What about the horses,” I gasped. “Did you see the horses?”

My rescue team glanced at each other. No, they said. There was just me. Just me and the churning water around me.

I refused transport to the hospital and instead a stranger offered me a ride home. I called my mom using their phone, told her I’d dropped mine in the water and that I was going to catch a ride to a repair place and see if it could be fixed. I’d meet them at home.

I didn’t tell them I almost drowned. I didn’t tell them about my great aunt or the horses.

A lot of houses were lost in the flood. There was only one drowning death and I read the announcement anxiously, trying to see if they had dark and curly hair. It was a man though. A young man that had stayed behind to try to get more of his things out of his apartment before it flooded. There was no mention of a woman and they didn’t find any bodies even after the water receded.

Dad finished his chemotherapy. I stayed for a few more months while he recovered from the ordeal and then I got a job offer and it was time to move on to somewhere else and start the next part of my life. I packed up my things, but by then, we’d sold or donated most of the dishware and other assorted things in the basement. There weren’t any boxes to move back into my bedroom.

I went back into the basement one last time, though. I took a few deep breaths.

It didn’t smell like anything. There was no trace of the smell of hay.

And outside, I backed out of their driveway and drove away in the bright sunlight with not a cloud in the sky.