Fifty-seven straight days of rain. By late December, the townsfolk were praying things would freeze over. Make a rink out of the flooded crossroads. Something for the kids at least. The little storms kept coming. Mild, except for the incessant wind, and every few hours the water would dump in sheets, smashing itself against every tin roof in the county in deafening bursts.
They holed up, mostly. Waiting out those cacophonous waves under damp blankets, venturing out only when the downpour dulled to a drizzle. Once the shop floors were ankle deep and the mayor had to wade to his mailbox, work was called off indefinitely.
On day sixty-three, there was a four hour reprieve. A window.
The mayor slogged his way from the front door to the road, or the tributary where the road used to be. He assessed the damage with measured patience and a tinge of panic.
Across the hilly little village, the ruin ranged from mucky marsh to full submersion. Some of the families had begun condensing households on the high ground.
The mayor pushed back his hat. Adjusted the straps on his waders. He rounded the corner, taking long strides until the floodwaters slowed his pace.
On the other side of the would be river, Mildred stood at the edge of her retaining wall, wringing towels into the rushing water below. Next door, Dr. Foster and his boys were huddled on the porch, building a barrel fire of sopping branches that would never light.
Food, of course, was becoming an issue.
The cloudy daylight passed into cloudier darkness. The mayor made his way back home, mud swirling around each rubberized step down Main Street. He’d checked on dozens of citizens in the few square miles of their township, and almost no one was okay. Down the hill, the Sandersons were confined to the second story and the drywall was coming apart. In the shack behind the body shop, Old Man Marcus had water up to his bunk.
The mayor closed the door behind him and sloshed across the living room. After a sopping climb up the stairs, he flopped into a wingback chair in the second floor study, the upholstery damp from unrelenting moisture in the air, its verbena pattern saturated and turned to a wet, deep violet.
His spine stiffened and he grasped at a rattling breath. The sobs emerged in bursts, their intervals shortening like the approaching thunderclaps. Tears went unnoticed among drips from his hair, his hat, the ceiling, the sky. Then the lightning came.
What had been a dull gray for days, even weeks, transformed to ominous black. The light of the day, all but gone, was snuffed out with impunity by the gathering stormhead, and the brutal rains returned with renewed vengeance.
The earth shook. The townspeople screamed. And still, the rains fell.
Bolts of terrible lightning, striking close enough to smell, flashed against every pane of glass in town. For fractions of a second, the little community was bathed in false daylight as bright as summer sun.
The thunder refused to rumble, but instead tore through the atmosphere in menacing shrieks, as though the the fabric of space was tearing apart in sizzling, cosmic horror.
In the morning, with ancestral trees splintered and shingles floating in rivulets between the houses, the baritone roll of thunder still sauntering in the distance, the mayor stepped through his front door to a despondent member of the Sanderson clan.
Before he could find the authority in his diaphragm, the scene presented itself plainly, tragically.
The little wind he had escaped in a waterlogged sigh.
The gray remained. The persistent drizzle. As best he could, the mayor went house to house as the morning waned, the Sanderson girl at his side until the search turned to swimming. Many of his knocks went unanswered, and he feared the worst for homes he couldn’t reach in the growing deluge.
By the time he made it back to Main Street, the mayor had counted ninety-three dead, another eighty-one unaccounted for. Burnt, bloated, or otherwise disfigured, like the sanctity of the village they called home, the storm’s deceased would go mostly uncollected.
The townsfolk grieved under makeshift awnings, shivering against the endless rain.
Three days later, another brief reprieve. Sunday morning sanctuary.
Limping on wrinkled feet and clutching damp blankets around their shoulders, many of the remaining villagers gathered on the mayor’s lawn. They squelched and slipped toward the porch in search of answers. Of hope.
At the bottom of the hill, a pious few swam toward the church.
The mayor emerged to a huddled mass of desperation. Soaked and hungry, the townsfolk stood gaunt in the muck, silenced by exhaustion and pallid with impending oblivion.
He tugged at the straps of his waders. Adjusted his hat. Stalled for time looking down at the warping floorboards of his porch.
He thought, in flashes, of the joyous, laugh-laden afternoons in the farmers market, last year’s student concert in the square. He remembered swearing in as a nervous greenhorn some decades back, put at ease by the caring gaze of Marcus, Ma Sanderson, the grandparents of some of those standing before him. Mildred herself filed the paperwork that made him mayor, and bent the trajectory of his life toward this moment.
“Folks. I don’t have much to say that ain’t mighty obvious. Not a dry spot in sight. If you’ve got nonperishables, best gather ’em up. Assumin’ it’s safe enough to do so.”
A bolt of lighting tore across the sky.
“Simple sundries is unimportant here. Foodgoods. Warmth. Those concerns mean most if the gettin’ is gettable.”
Low thrums of thunder, a few sprinkles against the mayor’s face. Droplets plopping into pools across town, their ripples coalescing and multiplying in frequency.
“I can’t tell ya what to do with your kin laid low, but I’d right suggest leavin’ em for the lord.”
The skies darkened once more, the bitter wind shrinking the crowd into their saturated garments and drawing weathered groans from the bones of the buildings.
“If Foster’s boat is still afloat, we’ll be needin’ it. And if any of these scraps can be fashioned into rafts, I’d bet whatever we have left is somewhere downstream.”