Flood

The skin between worlds lit up like a bruised knuckle. Lightning flashed through windows that let in nothing, not even air.At the secluded cabin, I scuffled with a perfect scrap of a woman, hoping she noticed the plastic wrapped around my throat, how every word struggled out. We weren't the ones God had spoken to. Yet I ached from kneeling. I sank like a pit through my own deep waters, in search of a myth I could burnish into gold. A story I could tell myself about the currents shifting underneath the world, ancient bindings that frayed daily, tides that rose and never seemed to recede.The woman was hurt. I ached. But every day it rained, and we couldn’t leave. Circled each other like chained animals breathing only the heat from our bodies. I made sounds she could touch. My face caught in hers like cloth snagged on a hook. The sky shuttered slate-gray, sun apathetic behind purple clouds. Coffee lingered in the bottom of our cups and went stale. Faith was a past relic, a flattened possum bleeding into concrete on the side of a distant road, and we were just flies picking over its corpse. Just jagged shards of driftwood floating on the surface of a submerged city. We told each other lies to pass the time. Only light was fast enough to reach us. Only one of us would survive this.