Flash Fiction: Thanks but we’re staying.
By: Emma Lou Pike
We used to play a game in the summer where we’d take turns throwing something out the living room window, then the other would dive after it. We’d time how long it would take to come back up to the surface. I never wanted him gone too long, so I’d throw things I knew would float, a shampoo bottle or a cushion from the sofa; afterward we’d have to wash it in the bathtub and it would take a long time because the water was so dirty and the old air in the apartment was so damp. Everything was so damp.
He liked to challenge me. Once he threw a small antique mirror high into the air like a frisbee and we both stood and watched it glint in the sunlight, turning over and over, before falling down into the dark water beneath. Sometimes I ripped off my clothes before I went in, just to make him laugh. To think, we used to be shy and amused that the neighbors might see our naked bodies through the windows of the apartment. They’d all since moved away, and we hadn’t seen another person for a long time. Just the birds and the wasps.
Of course, usually when we went outside, we’d stay towards the surface, climbing onto rooftops where possible and jumping small gaps between them. When the water first started to rise, we’d take trips in the canoe that we’d found floating past one evening as we gazed out at the sunset and drank stolen wine. I’d thought the canoe must have come away from someone’s car rack whilst they tried to flee the city, but when we caught it, it still had a leather handbag and a passport inside it.
On occasion, if I was feeling very daring, or very bored, I would walk out the front door and see how far down the central stairs I could go, clinging to the railing to pull myself along. I still never made it past the second floor down, but I could see into their apartment through the broken door. All the crumbling mid-century furniture and swirling clothing floated on the ceiling, the white paint flaked away. It was beautiful in an eerie way, like the ghosts of ballerinas dancing in zero gravity—when would this deadly dance make its way into our own home? Soon I would run out of breath and have to scramble back up the staircase. He would hand me a cup of tea and a towel and give me that look again, as though he were still charmed by my idiosyncrasies.
After some time, we had stopped running to the roof at the sound of helicopters, since they never seemed to stop for us. Perhaps they didn’t see us, I’d wondered at first, but after the seventh or eighth time it seemed as though they must have known we were there. I suppose it was protocol to focus on the lives that also helped themselves.
We hadn’t made any attempt to escape when the first flood started. A lot of neighbors had, at the early signs, driven to their second houses somewhere in the countryside, somewhere higher up. But this was our only home; The old build we had dreamed of the last four years of waiting in squalid sublets and friends’ spare rooms. We had loved it from the first moment. The quiet street lined with sycamores and a bakery on the ground floor. Fresh spring light streaming through our broad fifth-floor windows, every surface perfected with shiny new paint and varnished old wood. 100 square meters with a classically designed kitchen, tiles painted in “Frida Kahlo blue,” a small study, a spare room, a huge master bedroom where the previous owners had left a thriving Monstera deliciosa as a housewarming gift.
So when the first flood started and everyone told us they were moving on, we both decided we’d wait it out. It couldn’t possibly get very high! We were so sure, even as news reports of citywide blackouts made relatives begin to write long letters, offering us refuge in their spare room or garages. Of course everyone thought we were stupid, or crazy.