Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  Why would anyone just throw it away? Of course, you could. But why would anyone else? You’d be just fine, because you’re you. I won’t live forever like you.

  “No,” said Odin. “No. I’ll die.”

  She could tell he’d become frustrated. The god shook his head, white beard tossing. “It’s my fault you’re not understanding any of this. Everyone dies, eventually.” Odin sprawled on the soil beside her and laid his hands across his old face. “But that you’ll die, too?” His voice caught in his throat. “That’s what I can’t stand.”

  Remaining

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MASONS LEFT, THEY SAT TOGETHER IN THE living room. They stayed there with the news until late, the robins calling, then the mockingbird. They’d loaded their car earlier that afternoon. Holes in the wall had been patched, but the spackle needed painting. Scratches in the floor remained unbuffed. Carpet still torn. They were leaving a house in half-repair. That evening, when they had spoken to one another, their voices were worn at the edges, muffled as if under a quilt and bedsheets. After the eleven o’clock weather update, Mr. Nick woke the boys from where they sat and sent them off to bed. He woke them again in their beds long before sunrise. They left soon after. When Elise awoke, she couldn’t tell how long they’d been gone.

  She pulled herself into the walls and journeyed up through the home. The air was better here. Her forearms and fingers were weak, the back of her throat still ached, but the noise of her own body working against the walls energized her.

  “A spider monkey!” Brody had once called her, and she felt that way again. He’d said it one day after she’d shown him the old, hidden laundry chute. She had first shown him the bottom, the space behind the painted tree. And while he squinted up into the dark, Elise had challenged him to see if he could find where the chute opened up before she climbed to it herself. Brody’s lips curled into a grin, and he sprinted upstairs, pounding around, while Elise scaled the chute, hands and feet pressed against opposite sides, shimmying herself up.

  Before she made it halfway up, she heard the boy knocking against the loose board at the back of the bathroom cabinet. She saw him appear, a halo of light around his face. His smile opened into a look of shock.

  “What! You’re just hanging there!” Brody said. “In the air! You’re amazing!” And she’d felt that way, even though he’d won.

  Now, Elise drank a glass of cool water from the kitchen faucet. She poured herself a bowl of cereal (Cheerios—thank God). Good enough, even with no milk—the half-gallon the Masons usually kept had been thrown out. While Elise ate, she leaned back in her chair at the kitchen table, balancing it on two legs. She refilled the bowl and carried it into the living room. While the sun rose, she watched television with the volume nearly at its max, infomercials then cartoons. Elise wanted to feel swallowed by each show, like she could turn around and see the illustrated land or cityscape behind her. Every fifteen minutes, in sync with the tones of the clock, the emergency broadcast system trailed across the bottom of the screen, a red banner with white text declaring mandatory evacuations for the southern parishes—Plaquemines, Lafourche, St. Bernard.

  When the winds came, the sound was a massive tarp dragged across the yard. The light through the windows was half-formed through the clouds. Raindrops along the windowpanes gathered into small streams. Elise cooked macaroni and cheese for lunch and then lay on the library sofa, listening to Marshall’s old Walkman. In the parents’ bathroom, she took a long, warm bath, and watched the overhead bulb flicker, once, twice. The power stayed for now.

  Elise napped in the living room recliner, and when she awoke, she microwaved the rest of the macaroni for her dinner. By eight that evening, sunset shouldn’t have been for over an hour, but it was as dark as late night. The wren called out lonely from the foyer.

  “I’m still here,” she answered.

  Rising

  PEACE AT NIGHT IS A PRIVILEGE, SHE KNEW. THERE’S NOTHING about the dark that guarantees sleep. That night, Elise would not sleep at all, not for one moment. In each flash of lightning, she saw the trees tortured. Between each roar of thunder, she listened to them scream. The oak branches whipped around themselves into extreme angles. The spindly tallow tree bent until the top of its trunk bobbed into a black sheen of water. How could the sky hold so much rain? In a single gust, branches broke loose from the trees with the sound of gunfire. They beat against the house like massive fists.

  The power had been out since ten that evening, but her birds still sang. Elise didn’t hear them beneath the wind and the rain, but she knew they must be there. The cardinal, the starlings, the wren. She couldn’t be alone. Outside, she saw the dark shapes rising beyond the levee. Barges, left docked along the batture, ascended with the swelling river. Lightning flashed, and she saw water brimming the levee like a tub overflowing.

  Thrashing against the top of the house, loose branches turned into airborne torpedoes, the whole sky was the inside of a tornado. What must be the dormer window shattering above. Elise paced the hallway, the sound of her footsteps swallowed by the noise outside, the windows in all the rooms clattering at her. The scented candle she’d taken from the office, she had held cupped between her hands. But it had gone out. The house shook. She worried the roof would pull free. She ran down the stairs.

  “I don’t know where to go!” Elise screamed. A little girl’s voice.

  Floodwater bled in through the crack beneath the front door.

  The River Is a God Arisen

  OKAY TO CRY.

  The floodwater increasing, and the floor of the home changing into a swamp. The wind outside: a train raging on its tracks, its horn relentless, the sound throttling even the insides of her body. But safer here than anywhere else. Safer on the first floor, in the now rising water. Didn’t seem real, but it was true: the wind might yet tear the second story from the building.

  Elise walked through the rooms, hoping some part of the house could save her. The insides of the walls? No, they would flood as well.

  Better to stay in the open. In the library. From where she sat on the sofa she could see the shape of the bird clock in the foyer. There, squatting in the dark, rising water. There it was, still, along with her.

  The water felt cold against her feet, but she kept them on the floor. Measured the rising water against her ankles and legs. This was important, she sensed.

  She waited. Waited until the water reached her knees, then she’d have to move. The windows might break around her, and the door might be thrown open, but she’d deal with those as they came. But until the water lapped against her knees—when that came, she’d wade for the staircase. Go to the next best place that would give her a chance to survive. Adjust when the space around her changes. And, if need be: cry.

  Why not? Yell and scream, too! Let the whole world hear!

  The house shook, and books from the bottom shelves rose and floated in the coal-black water around her. The water had become a living thing. But still she stayed—only at her calves. Her toes grew numb, and the chill rose through her legs and waist, but the quilt behind her was dry. She pulled it over her shoulders. As long as the water stayed, she’d be okay. The walls were strong here—she knew this old house well enough.

  “Are you taking me home?” Elise shouted into the dark. “Taking me with you?”

  She kept her feet in the water. If it rose too quickly, if it lapped against her knees, she’d need to climb the stairs. She told herself the sound outside was no more different than New Year’s fireworks. Okay to be afraid. The whole world was being re-formed, but her mom and her dad—as always, still there with her.

  Morning

  SHE WATCHED THE SKY FROM HER PARENTS’ OLD BEDROOM. THE clouds hung around like inverted hills, but their gray had begun to fracture, outlined with blue and cantaloupe orange. The wind, through the open window, felt as cool as fall across her face. The world had been wasted. Gnarled, broken branches broke the surface of the yard’s brown water like the twisting bodies o
f sea snakes. The trees had lost height from the bottom of their trunks. Strips of the house’s siding had peeled free and dangled, bobbing in and out of the flood. The gutter beneath her window was gone, missing. The only sound was the lapping of the water.

  Not far off, one of the river barges had broken free of its docking chains and now perched, massive as a train, on the length of the levee. Nearly teetering over the side. Elise realized that if the river had risen higher, the barge would have flowed fully over, swept across the road through the trees and yard. Through her house, maybe, too. Last night, she’d no idea how close that possibility was.

  The downstairs had completed its transformation; the outside reached inside. The swamp had climbed four of the staircase steps—waist high for her—but by morning it seemed to be slowly descending. Eventually, Elise had needed to climb to the second story when the floodwater rose, and up there, she found that the attic had been leaking, with water trickling down its stairs into the hall. Elise spent the night in Mr. and Mrs. Mason’s bed, with their blankets pulled over her head. With her eyes closed, it might as well have been any bed. From any time.

  Over the course of the morning, Elise opened all the second-story storm windows. No worries about mosquitoes and other insects—for now, they must have been washed away by the water and wind. Her birds in the clock had gone quiet. The storm had taken them, too. Elise felt their absence through every part of her body. She was alone in the world, and it seemed nothing else had survived. Had she survived? Was this an afterlife?

  When Elise needed breakfast, she waded through the downstairs water. The pressure of the flood had pushed the front door wide open. In the living room, her legs heavy through the water, she plodded past the flotsam. She noted the objects that floated: pillows, plastic picture frames, a table lamp on its side, a vase, VHS tapes, the television remote. There were other things that hadn’t floated, that existed only as the outlines of forms, things she felt with her feet beneath the surface.

  In the kitchen, the cabinets and pantry doors had spilled open, and she passed among the tin pots, sodden boxes of ice cream cones and taco shells, spices, a Tupperware tube of pasta noodles, and packets of chili powders—each half-obscured by the dark water and dipping below the surface as she neared them. She sloshed into the pantry and pulled herself up on the shelves. Up there, she found only a box of uncooked rice, three-quarters empty. The rest had fallen in. Elise popped the top and poured the dry rice into her mouth, trying her best to chew. Below her, a jar of peanut butter lid-up in the water, and she twisted it open and swallowed three fingerfuls. Then she went upstairs and dried off, falling across Mr. and Mrs. Mason’s bed, their bedsheets her towel. Elise lay on her back, limbs outstretched, her body open to the broken house around her, and she dozed. Slept for the first time since yesterday morning. Dreamless from exhaustion.

  And when she woke, she stayed in bed for a while. Wondered what it was like for the city. How was that new house? The one she and her parents had lived in for a few months, that never felt like home. Their furniture seeming awkward and out of place in the new rooms, the cardboard boxes full of their things still unpacked, until the end. Elise wondered whether the flood had washed away that antiseptic smell that clung to the building, the house’s uncomfortable, unplaceable newness. She figured some new family had already moved in there by now. Her and her parents’ old things shipped off to some now-flooded dump.

  Elise wondered how the storm was for others in her neighborhood. Earlier that morning, she’d looked out to make sure Ms. Wanda’s house had made it fine through the storm, and that the woman wasn’t still home, in danger. Her land, beyond the field, was on slightly higher ground, and the water hardly reached above the bricks on which her house sat. Elise had never asked Brody what his own house was like—whether it was two or one story, if it were raised on bricks or stilts. She wished she had. Elise hoped he and his aunt, and even the uncle he said he hated, had made it out safe.

  Elise wished she had someone else to talk to now, to talk about the storm, to say—what?—that it had felt like a dream, like the inside of a whirlwind, and that everything after didn’t seem as real as before. This wasn’t the first time Elise had felt this way. Maybe this was aging, growing up. She clenched her teeth. A progression of hells, of fires and storms that make the world seem less and less like the one you thought you knew.

  After noon, the air had once again grown hot and humid. The sun-glinted water remained across the front yard to the levee. For some reason, Elise figured that the river, hidden from her view, flowed backward now. She got out of bed and instinctively flipped the switch to turn on the overhead fan. Didn’t work.

  Duh. Would have been more concerning if it had. She smelled the house’s dampness—like a rotting log. Any electricity here might start a fire.

  Elise twisted in place and stretched her torso. She must not have moved at all in her nap. It looked as though she’d slept for a couple hours. She raised an arm and smelled an armpit.

  “Yeesh.”

  Her whole body was basted in sweat. The bedsheets would reek of her, she realized. Would the Masons notice?

  “They won’t,” she said.

  If they did, they’d probably think it was an animal. Some raccoon that made its way inside during the storm to find shelter that spent a night in their bed. Or else, well, maybe they would think it was her. Did she care anymore if they knew? Would they care? With the house flooded, Elise considered that she might go ahead and sit up in the window to wave at them as they drove in. She figured they had bigger problems than her. At least for a while.

  Homeowner

  BUT THE DAY WAS DRIFTING BY, AND EVENTUALLY, INSECTS AND vermin would return from wherever they had hidden during the storm. Soon enough, they’d fill every room of her house. Mosquitoes bouncing against the ceilings. Tadpoles swirling in the cones of fallen lampshades. Frogs and snakes nestled between the couch cushions. Her house was still soggy as a wet sponge.

  “Standing, though,” she said. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  Elise went downstairs, back into the water, to the laundry room circuit breaker. She’d never been in a flooded house before, but she’d been in hurricanes. The lights had always come back on a day or two after the winds died down. This storm might have been different, though. And lying around in the heat, with nothing much else to do, was great inspiration to think of hypothetical reasons for ways her house might yet still be broken. Elise tried to think like an adult, and she figured she couldn’t have electricity returned to walls that were still filled and saturated with water.

  She’d never opened the circuit-breaker box before, but she’d been there with her father a couple times after a fuse had gone out. She’d never looked into the box, only had seen the front of the metal cover swung open and her father’s grim face as he looked over its insides. She figured it must have been filled with wires and complex, colored bulbs. But instead, when Elise opened the cover, she saw small, black switches. Nothing much to it. The simple, red handle on the side seemed obvious enough to pull.

  “Voilà,” Elise said. She had no idea whether that would even help anything—the likelihood that the power would be restored any time this week, or month maybe, might be expecting too much. But there was satisfaction in knowing that she’d taken care. She felt that her dad would be proud. Nearby, the board he had painted with the tree had come loose with the rising water, a corner jutting free like a hand gone rigid in the act of beckoning.

  After, in the kitchen pantry, Elise found a collection of submerged, plastic-wrapped water bottles, and she knocked back two of them in a row. Dropped the empty bottles to the water’s surface. The trash can didn’t seem to hold much of a purpose right now. The floodwater felt cool against her legs, and Elise bent over and splashed it against her face and hair. Dirty water—she could imagine her mother raising her eyebrow at this particular decision—but the cool moisture felt good running down her shoulders and back.

  Elise went ag
ain through all the rooms of her house. Every branch of the World Tree.

  So different now, first floor half-submerged, but with the same floorplan, her walls all in the same places as they’d always been. Ruined but, in a way, more like her home than it had been in a long time. The quiet of the water dripping from the insides of the cabinets. The breeze, which sent the loose siding tapping against the outside walls.

  Her home. Her big, dying home.

  The World Ends

  ELISE HAD BEGUN TO THINK OF THE COMING NIGHT, WHETHER SHE should close the windows, seal off the home as much as she could, or embrace the break in liminality, recognize that, for now, inside and outside had joined. Tuck herself into a garbage bag, to prevent the insect bites. Pitch a small fire on the front porch tile. Become a wild girl inside her own home. There was no telling how long until the Masons returned, but it might yet be days. Roads, when drained and opened, would be clogged with sedans and trucks, cars with their trunks bungee-corded shut. Dead-eyed traffic lights. Roofing nails littering the asphalt. Elise might as well grow comfortable in the solitude. She’d have to do something about food soon, though. About clean water.

  But as she once again stepped out of the flood to climb the staircase, she heard, outside, the rushing of a current, a single wave with one continuous cresting. The sound grew louder—and Elise went to the front door to look. It took a while for the source of the sound to break past the trees that bordered the yard, to enter into her view. The first of the vehicles returning after the storm. Its engine rumbled, transmission belts soaked and squealing.

  When Elise saw the truck coming, she could tell it should have waited longer, for the floodwaters to drop more. It shouldn’t have been driving that road. Waves splashed gray against the truck’s sides, licking the door handles. Its windows rolled completely down—the inside cabin must have been soaked. If the driver so much as pressed on his brakes, the wake of the truck would catch up and sink its bed, cabin, and engine.