After the Flood, and: Metropolitan, and: Winter Festival, and: The Bridges

After the Flood

The day was bright. We saw where the water stopped rising by the marks on the vinyl siding. The raccoons had all come down from their trees, but no one could say where they had gone. On our walk, we found a truck tire welded to the riverbank. The water beside it was a silver ribbon. It was doing its best impression of something that would not chew holes in the railbeds and cover the town with a fine patina of river mud. It was bucolic, the word the Realtors used, convincing us to build here—beneath the trees that never burn, the sky that is ever blue.

Metropolitan

In the evening, we got high on the roof and watched the people and the cars pulsing eight stories below us. The scene never repeated itself, and in the air above us, always at least three planes. Our friend who was missing, who was living on the edge of a desert in Mauritania, had written that there were never planes, that the people in his village would not believe him when he said the slow-moving lights in the night sky were satellites. Dung fires and lanterns were all they had for a skyline. They ran a projector off of a car battery and watched old cartoons on somebody’s bedsheet pulled taut across a wire. Here, the light was careless. The rooms remained lit even when no one was coming back. If we stayed on that roof long enough, the city would begin to ignite. We understood how people were drawn to it over a great distance, how things accrete, accumulate. It was like an avalanche moving down a mountain, getting larger as it went, but made of light. Each night it came down on us like a glittering disaster. We passed the joint. We uncapped the bottle. Even if we ran, we would still be in its path.

Winter Festival

The driveway is too deep to be shoveled. At a time like this, you learn what can be done with mustard and flour and martini olives. And in the first days of it, you have the feeling you could keep this up for weeks. The season holds fast like a grocery bag caught in somebody’s chain link. Every few days, there is the brief cracking of another barn roof giving in. You wait for the snowplow to clear a path to the liquor store, as the salt eats into the mortar of your porch and the hawk stays pinned like a boutonniere to the branch above the feeder. Although you haven’t filled it, the finches come to check on it at dusk. The lights of the prison, on the opposite hill, are plain as the stars you once made love beneath.

The Bridges

By day, the bridges of Philadelphia looked like pulled-apart battleships. But at night, they were stars swept into pretty shapes, they were constellations I could cross. There was always a girl on the other side—after the toll, after the road divided into neighborhoods and corner stores. It was an agony to run into traffic, to be stalled before the glittering city, suspended above the black water by little threads. The radio said nothing I wanted, no matter how I twirled the dial. The accident up ahead was too far away to understand. I could only stay in line as I moved another car length closer—to the girl who checked her lipstick, the girl who checked her watch.