“Hear what?” says Isabel.
“Floods,” he says. “Listen.”
But that is the exact instant the kitchen light flickers, goes brown, goes gold, platinum, then permanently dark. The radio is silent. Some motor that is always on in the house is not on now, and the absence of its low, continuous hum makes the wind outside louder.
“Floods,” says Isabel’s father. “Floods, they say.”
“Not here,” says Isabel.
“Everywhere,” says her father. “The whole county.”
“But we’re on high ground,” she says.
She goes to the window and sees that water in the stream is racing, whitecapped and the color of her lips. It has already embraced the roots of the willow and is lapping at the southernmost leg of the picnic table where she likes to work on her computer.
“The lights are out,” says Paulette, who has just entered the kitchen in her red pajamas with the feet on them and the hatch in the back.
“Go back upstairs,” says Isabel, “and put on your clothes. Tell everyone that they can’t come down until they are in their clothes. Shoes too.”
“The wrath of Ivy,” says Isabel’s father.
“That’s a stupid joke, Dad.”
“I mean the hurricane.”
“I know. But it’s still a stupid joke.”
It is an hour later and Isabel and Ivy’s mother is sitting at the table, an empty bowl of cereal in front of her. “What are we going to do when the food goes bad?” she says. Her hair is turban shaped and the color of shredded wheat. Her kidney-bean eyes are made huge and concave by the thick lenses of her glasses.
“It’s not going to go bad,” says Ivy, wiping Jerry’s mouth with the kitchen towel. “You are such a slob,” she tells him. “The fridge will keep the food cold for days,” she tells her mother.
“What about after that?”
“Tuna fish,” says Dr. Soros. “Lots of tuna fish!”
“Guys,” says Gwenny, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.
“I wish you had gotten some batteries,” says Ivy and Isabel’s mother.
“Guys,” says Gwenny.
“What?” says Isabel.
Gwenny doesn’t answer, just looks over her shoulder into the living room.
A braid of lip-red water is flowing across the hickory floorboards. All at once everyone can hear the sound of a cow urinating somewhere in the living room.
“It’s coming right under the front door,” says Gwenny.
Almost
When Dr. Soros panics, he loses all ability to coordinate his left side, so Isabel has to carry him in her arms out to the white van and buckle him into his seat.
As the family exits the house, the flood is flowing ankle deep through the front door. Gwenny, the last to leave, tries to pull the door shut behind her, but the water forms a small mountain against it, and the door flies open again and again. Finally she gives up.
Ivy is in the driver’s seat. Isabel rides shotgun. The rest of the family crams into seats beside and behind Dr. Soros. The van’s side door slides shut.
Ivy steers the van through the river that has covered their driveway and half their lawn and is flowing through the house. “Where should I go?” she asks.
“Up,” says Isabel. “Where else?”
The road in front of their house is covered by a hissing, pinkish sheet of water. But after a few yards the road is only rainstorm wet and pocked with leaping gray drop-splashes. Ivy heads east, then turns west, then east again, then west—uphill all the while.
“We’re away from the worst of it,” says Isabel and Ivy’s mother.
Paulette is sitting with her neck upstretched and her eyes fixed on the back of her grandfather’s head. She is making swallowing noises. Warm tears mix with the raindrops on her cheeks.
Isabel and Ivy say nothing. Even through the closed windows they can hear a roar so forceful and low, it is more like the shuddering of the earth than an actual sound. Where normally there is only a cattail-clogged trickle, an avenue of red surf pours down the hillside. This is the very stream that has subsumed their yard and is rearranging the furniture inside their house. As the roar becomes louder, the sisters trade glances but still say nothing. They round a bend, mount a crest, and at last can see that the bridge crossing the stream has held. Water shoots in a pink spume out of its downhill side.
Both sisters have been holding their breath. Now their throats unclamp; air flows from their lungs. Ivy smiles, and accelerates.
A tree trunk as thick as an oil drum and as long as a salad bar bucks, rolls, and tumbles through the lip-red water. It is approaching the bridge at the exact same speed as the van. The trunk reaches the bridge first, its rooty end striking one side of the culvert, its snapped-off end slamming into the other. The torrent makes a sound like a lion clearing its throat, because now almost all of the water is prevented from flowing under the culvert, and the water that does flow there rockets over the tree flank in a blade of froth. The water blocked by the tree dithers and roils for the second or two it takes to mount the riverbank, then it surges across the road exactly where the van is driving. Had Ivy’s foot depressed the gas pedal by even one more quarter-inch, the van would have made it onto the bridge and to the safety of the high ground on the other side.
Sorority
Ivy is rendered useless, as are the van’s steering wheel, brakes, gas pedal, and motor. The van is swept sideways across the road, tailwise down the embankment, and then sideways again through a cow pasture that is now a red ocean. For a very brief moment after the van has been swept back into the streambed, where the current flows most forcefully, it is pointing in the same direction that the water is flowing, and this allows Ivy to feel that she is driving on the red surf. Then the van hits a steep-sloped pyramid of rock the size of a garage and is anchored there, nose upward, by the current, which roars pinkly around its lower half, smashing all the windows and sweeping away four of the children and both grandparents before Isabel and Ivy, in the front seat, have a chance to look around.
Ivy’s eyes are moon bright and blind. She is shouting something, but Isabel cannot hear what it is. The sound of the water has grown very, very large, and Ivy’s voice has grown mouse small. The door next to Isabel is gone, and so is the sliding door to the back. Or maybe the sliding door is just open. For some reason Isabel finds it impossible to tell what has happened to the door, and she will never possess more than a shaky hypothesis.
Gwenny—her own daughter, her eldest child—is clinging to the post between the front and back doors with both arms, her cheek bleeding from a row of triangular punctures, her eyes also moon bright. Isabel pushes Gwenny’s ribs. “Let go!” Isabel shouts. “Let go! Get out of here!”
At first Gwenny looks at her mother as if she doesn’t know who she is. Then recognition dawns, and with it, that sort of pliable stupidity that is a form of trust. She lets go, slides away from the van, but at the last second Isabel shoves her with such force that she lands against the pyramid of rock with half her body out of the water. Her elbows (pointing skyward, angled like grasshopper legs) waver back and forth as she lifts herself out of the water. Then she is kneeling on top of the rock.
Little Jerry has climbed from the back seat, where he once sat next to his grandfather, and is clutching his mother around the neck. Ivy can’t unfasten her seat belt. Isabel does it for her, then unfastens her own. When she slides out the door and into the water, she finds that, in fact, it is easy to clamber up onto the rock. Gwenny has vanished. There is a dense wood of black sticks and shining leaves behind the rock. Gwenny is there somewhere. Isabel knows that if she looks again, she will see her.
Ivy and Jerry slide toward the door. As their weight shifts within the van, the van shifts on the rock. They both reach for Isabel, who manages to grab one hand of each, and as the van slides out from under them and rolls with a groan and a heavy sigh into the current, she pulls them onto the rock—but not qui
te. The river takes hold of their legs and, in an instant, they are dragged back into the red water—Isabel too, still holding on to their hands.
All is roaring and bubbly dimness.
Then Isabel feels gravel beneath her feet and finds that she can stand, her head and shoulders out of the water. She is not sure at first, but soon she sees that she is still holding Ivy’s and Jerry’s hands, and they are both looking at her with the terrific seriousness of the mortally ill. Isabel realizes that she has been swept into an eddy behind the rock and that the water is only swirling idly around her pelvis and legs. Ivy and Jerry are still in the racing current, however, and Isabel is leaning backward to keep them all from being pulled downstream.
Isabel realizes three things in a single instant:
1. She is not strong enough to continue to hold her sister and her nephew; the exhaustion in her shoulders and hands has reached that point when it is searing pain.
2. Even as she is constantly stepping backward in a sort of reverse pedaling, the gravel beneath her feet is constantly giving way and she is being pulled inexorably toward the current.
3. If she lets go of Jerry, Ivy might still drag her into the flood, whereas if she lets go of Ivy and continues to hold on to Jerry, there is a chance that she might be able to lift him to safety and then climb up after him.
Isabel conveys all this information to her sister in a single glance.
As Ivy slides away on the flood, her eyes are locked on Isabel’s with complete comprehension. Ivy’s face grows smaller and smaller atop the current, and she seems to be shooting backward in time: not thirty-nine anymore, but thirty-five, then twenty-eight, then seventeen, twelve, five—until, just before she disappears over the falls some hundred yards downstream, her face seems to journey through something other than time, because, as small as it continues to grow, it never looks remotely like an infant’s face, but more like that of an elf, then a fairy, then the bride on a wedding cake, and finally like a dotted face on a pencil-tip eraser.
Then Ivy is gone.
Isabel’s back is against the pyramid rock and Jerry’s back is against her chest.
“Mommy!” he cries, clawing at the red water with both hands.
“Hush,” says Isabel.
“Mommy! Mommy!” Jerry strains helplessly against the rigid rings of Isabel’s arms.
“Hush,” says Isabel. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
“Come on,” she says. “We have to get onto the rock, or we’ll get washed away too.”
“Mahhhh-meeee!” screams Jerry. “Mahhhh-meeee!”
“As soon as this is over, we’ll come back and look for her,” says Isabel. “I promise. But we have to go now or we are going to die.”
“Noooo!” shouts Jerry. “Mahhhh-meeee!”
Isabel has to fight the urge to let him go too. And then she wonders if that wouldn’t, in fact, be the best thing to do.
KAREN RUSSELL
Madame Bovary’s Greyhound
FROM Zoetrope: All-Story
I. First Love
THEY TOOK WALKS to the beech grove at Banneville, near the abandoned pavilion. Foxglove and gillyflowers, beige lichen growing in one thick, crawling curtain around the socketed windows. Moths blinked wings at them, crescents of blue and red and tiger-yellow, like eyes caught in a net.
Emma sat and poked at the grass with the skeletal end of her parasol, as if she were trying to blind each blade.
“Oh, why did I ever get married?” she moaned aloud, again and again.
The greyhound whined with her, distressed by her distress. Sometimes, in a traitorous fugue, the dog forgot to be unhappy and ran off to chase purple butterflies or murder shrewmice, or to piss a joyful stream onto the topiaries. But generally, if her mistress was crying, so was the puppy. Her name was Djali, and she had been a gift from the young woman’s husband, Dr. Charles Bovary.
Emma wept harder as the year grew older and the temperature dropped, folding herself into the white monotony of trees, leaning further and further into the bare trunks. The dog would stand on her hind legs and lick at the snow that fused Emma’s shoulders to the coarse wood, as if trying to loosen a hardening glue, and the whole forest would quiver and groan together in sympathy with the woman, and her phantom lovers, and Djali.
At Banneville the wind came directly from the sea and covered the couple in a blue-salt caul. The greyhound loved most when she and Emma were outside like this, bound by the membrane of a gale. Yet as sunset fell Djali became infected again by her woman’s nameless terrors. Orange and red, they seemed to sweat out of the wood. The dog smelled nothing alarming, but love stripped her immunity to the internal weathers of Emma Bovary.
The blood-red haze switched to a silvery blue light, and Emma shuddered all at once, as if in response to some thicketed danger. They returned to Tostes along the highway.
The greyhound was ignorant of many things. She had no idea, for example, that she was a greyhound. She didn’t know that her breed had originated in southern Italy, an ancient pet in Pompeii, a favorite of the thin-nosed English lords and ladies, or that she was perceived to be affectionate, intelligent, and loyal. What she did know, with a whole-body thrill, was the music of her woman coming up the walk, the dizzying explosion of perfume as the door swung wide. She knew when her mistress was pleased with her, and that approval was the fulcrum of her happiness.
“Viscount! Viscount!” Emma whimpered in her sleep. (Rodolphe would come onto the scene later, after the greyhound’s flight, and poor Charlie B. never once featured in his wife’s unconscious theater.) Then Djali would stand and pace stiff-legged through the cracked bowl of the cold room into which her mistress’s dreams were leaking, peering with pricked ears into shadows. It was a strange accordion that linked the woman and the dog: Vaporous drafts caused their pink and gray bellies to clutch inward at the same instant. Moods blew from one mind to the other, delight and melancholy. In the blue atmosphere of the bedroom, the two were very nearly (but never quite) one creature.
Even asleep, the little greyhound trailed after her madame, through a weave of green stars and gas lamps, along the boulevards of Paris. It was a conjured city that no native would recognize—Emma Bovary’s head on the pillow, its architect. Her Paris was assembled from a guidebook with an out-of-date map, and from the novels of Balzac and Sand, and from her vividly disordered recollections of the viscount’s ball at La Vaubyessard, with its odor of dying flowers, burning flambeaux, and truffles. (Many neighborhoods within the city’s quivering boundaries, curiously enough, smelled identical to the viscount’s dining room.) A rose and gold glow obscured the storefront windows, and cathedral bells tolled continuously as they strolled past the same four landmarks: a tremulous bridge over the roaring Seine, a vanilla-white dress shop, the vague façade of the opera house—overlaid in more gold light—and the crude stencil of a theater. All night they walked like that, companions in Emma’s phantasmal labyrinth, suspended by her hopeful mists, and each dawn the dog would wake to the second Madame Bovary, the lightly snoring woman on the mattress, her eyes still hidden beneath a peacock sleep mask. Lumped in the coverlet, Charles’s blocky legs tangled around her in an apprehensive pretzel, a doomed attempt to hold her in their marriage bed.
II. A Change of Heart
Is there any love as tireless as a dog’s in search of its master? Whenever Emma was off shopping for nougat in the market or visiting God in the churchyard, Djali was stricken by the madness of her absence. The dog’s futile hunt through the house turned her maniacal, cannibalistic: She scratched her fur until it became wet and dark. She paced the halls, pausing only to gnaw at her front paws. Félicité, the Bovarys’ frightened housekeeper, was forced to imprison her in a closet with a water dish.
The dog’s change of heart began in September, some weeks after Madame Bovary’s return from La Vaubyessard, where she’d dervished around in another man’s arms and given up forever on the project of lov
ing Charles. It is tempting to conclude that Emma somehow transmitted her wanderlust to Djali; but perhaps this is a sentimental impulse, a storyteller’s desire to sync two flickering hearts.
One day Emma’s scents began to stabilize. Her fragrance became musty, ordinary, melting into the house’s stale atmosphere until the woman was nearly invisible to the animal. Djali licked almond talc from Emma’s finger-webbing. She bucked her head under the madame’s hand a dozen times, waiting for the old passion to seize her, yet her brain was uninflamed. The hand had become generic pressure, damp heat. No joy snowed out of it as Emma mechanically stroked between Djali’s ears, her gold wedding band rubbing a raw spot into the fur, branding the dog with her distraction. There in the bedroom, together and alone, they watched the rain fall.
By late February, at the same time Charles Bovary was dosing his young wife with valerian, the dog began refusing her mutton chops. Emma stopped checking her gaunt face in mirrors, let dead flies swim in the blue glass vases. The dog neglected to bark at her red-winged nemesis, the rooster. Emma quit playing the piano. The dog lost her zest for woodland homicide. Under glassy bathwater, Emma’s bare body as still and bright as quartz in a quarry, she let the hours fill her nostrils with the terrible serenity of a drowned woman. Her gossamer fingers circled her navel, seeking an escape. Fleas held wild circuses on Djali’s ass as she lay motionless before the fire for the duration of two enormous logs, unable to summon the energy to spin a hind leg in protest. Her ears collapsed against her skull.
Charles rubbed his hand greedily between Emma’s legs and she swatted him off; Emma stroked the dog’s neck and Djali went stiff, slid out of reach. Both woman and animal, according to the baffled Dr. Bovary, seemed bewitched by sadness.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 36