Water

Excerpt from Waters Run Wild

Andréa Fekete

 

I have been let go.  I collected for months, and now I come down and down.  I’m leaning to the right and around the bend and further into black.  Need someone to come to, someone to give myself over to.  Want something to wrap around, and I sense them.  The men are clawing at the walls, flailing inside me.  Forty-five, sixty, seventy-three.  I quiet the screams. Men and young men all in black suits, taken up and left floating behind me.

 

I see a black man.  His eyes shine in the dark, and I see his teeth and tongue when he screams out at me, palms outstretched.  He drops his pick and shovel, turns, runs.  I slip beneath him, pick him up.  He swims inside me a moment and, then, nothing.  

 

I pick three more.  I sling one of them against the tunnel wall.  He’s out before he realizes what I am.  He floats along with me and the other one hundred or so men I have taken down so far.  I see two men squatting.  I tumble over them like a wave.  Screaming and more screaming.  There is no need to scream.  I quiet them as I rush for the ones ahead—some crawling, some running.  I quiet them all.  The small ones, the sixteen-year-olds and the six-feet-tall, two-hundred-pound brutes.  None can run faster than I come.

 

A fourteen-year-old stands shivering, holding his cap tight to his chest, clinching his eyes shut as his cap slides from his fingertips to the black dirt below.  I hit his knees hard, pull him down and listen to his prayers about his brothers, his mother and his father who is further down in the mine.  I listen.  Then I whisper something to him.  I think he hears me because he stops fighting and lets me carry his limp body through the tunnel.

 

All washed clean.  All taken.  I rise from the floor and up to their waists, and I pour into the next section, and here stands a father and a son.  Son reaches out his arm as if he is going to stop me. 

 

“Isaac!” The father screams. 

 

I only slide past them, surrounding their ankles at first.  Slate loosens from above and falls on us all.  I am trapped here for now.  They are trapped.  I’m rising above them slowly as I’m looking for a way to get out.  Blood trickles down the son’s left eye.  The father’s body is firm and his arms float as I take him.  He lifts them as if to let me.  He leans back a little.  Breathing gets deeper, but flimsy somehow.  He is panting and touching the top of the tunnel now as I lift him and his son clear off their feet.  Father’s eyes blink as I reach them as if he can keep me from coming into them.  I come into his eyes, his suit, his body.  Peeling. I peel at them both.  The father reaches out to grab the son’s arm.  He grabs it tightly as they hold their faces up to kiss the slate above, to breathe where I haven’t yet reached. 

 

“I love you, Isaac! I love you, son.”  

 

Isaac’s eyes grow wide as he breathes a shallow breath.  

 

A wooden cage rises to the top.  A small canary flies out, and I shove the yellow bird against the slate along with their faces, and I come up around their eyes and up around their noses. 

 

Inside me, Isaac looks into his father’s face, and his father looks into his as they both struggle to hold their breath.  Their limbs move slower now and their hair sways in my motion.  I have found a crack through which to slip and, slowly, I begin to lower, but I’m too slow.  Their eyes are wider now.  I want to let them go.  I realize I can’t. 

 

The father gives up first—opens his mouth and breathes me in willingly.  Isaac’s mouth forms an “O” shape in a scream I’m sure would’ve had tears had I not been here.

Originally published by Sweetgum Press (2010).