Cataclysm Baby

Oneida, Ophelia, Ornella

My siren-daughters, my sweet-singing beauties: Whose songs pierced even the thickest of our soundproofed buildings, even the home where once they lived inside, when they were still part of my fractured family, still children under my care. Who, long before the floods began, once lined up beside their mother upon her piano bench, each daughter differing only in age and size, otherwise blessed with the same white-blonde hair, the same eyes so green they glittered even after we extinguished the lamp-light.

While their mother pressed each key in turn, these three daughters hummed along, matching their voices to the piano’s percussion, to the tones that escaped its upright body. One by one they captured its voice, contained it in their chests, so that soon we heard the piano even when no one was playing, its notes coming from our white-fenced yard, from their playroom, from the tight porcelain confines of their shared bath times.

It wasn’t until the rains started that the oldest learned to mimic her mother’s mouth-noises, and so it was she who first licked her lips at the dinner table and then repeated every sonorous syllable of my wife’s speech, the description of her day at the dykes, binding dams with all the other mothers recently pressed into service, no longer allowed to stay home with their children. Soon the younger two could do as well as the oldest, all of them speaking in their mother’s many voices, matching the pitch and timbre that accompanied each shift of mood and mannerism.

How soon after did they learn to throw their own voices, to call out from places they could not possibly be? When did I first hear my wife’s words from every room, calling me to dinner, calling me to work, calling me to bed to make another daughter, so that the song might go on, might swell?

What choir of sisters my daughters wanted, and what chorus they were denied, for my wife had already shut her womb to me and to the wet world around us, saying that if we could not ensure the future of the children we already had, then what point was there in bringing more into our flooding home?

Still our daughters pestered. Still they mimicked. Still I fell for their many tricks, because I too wanted the next child they wished my wife to make.

With their changeable voices, they lured me out of the study, out of the house and into the drowned neighborhood left behind by the breeching of the levees, those imperfect barriers giving way to the rush of rainwater, to the floating freeze of recent hail. And if I never caught my daughters, I at least found what they wanted to show me, the new landmarks of our remade neighborhood: First, a dog floating short-leashed and bloated, then the submerged beauty of our once dry library. Other things they’d wanted, and by our failing world were denied.

What family meeting we had then, loud of volume, each daughter throwing out her mother’s speech and then mine too, until all our parentage was lost to their same-enunciated disavowals, on and on until my lungs hung empty against my sorrowed heart, until I could no longer give voice to the word no, to the word stop, to the words no please stop.

And what then? What could we do to these daughters after we were forced to move onto the second floor, those cramped rooms stuck atop our submerged stairs? Or even later, when our neighbors rowed over to bring us news about the first of the drowned, victims rushing out into the water to save some loved one screaming for help but finding only undertows thick with brambles and water snakes?

To pretend it wasn’t happening. To go to rooftop funerals and say nothing. To stand with my hand in my wife’s or some daughter’s, while widows and widowers lamented that they’d never hear their loved ones again, and then to say, Well, perhaps not, but perhaps yes too.

And then my wife being lured out. My wife who should have known better being trapped in water over her head, treading for hours in the river that used to be our tree-lined street.

And then my not going to help her, my believing her dying words only the voices of our missing daughters, another of their tricks: That it was me they were trying to kill, and their mother’s voice the bait.

And then those daughters returned to my side, mock-crying into each other’s mourning dresses, each bedecked with my wife’s pearls, her costumed brooches and rings.

Long after her funeral barge had been pushed away, still I heard my wife begging me to save her from the steep waters beyond the bounds of our town, swirling beneath the all-day and all-night pitch of our cloud-darked world.

When my rowboat left again and did not come back, when my daughters who took it did not come back either, even then I did not fear for their safety, because still at night I could stand on my roof and listen to my wife crying out in the downpour, accompanied only by the frog-song and wind-roar that replaced all the other sounds I once heard upon our submerged street.

And now? How many wet years has it been? How long since I last saw land, since I knew the smell of grass or tree or rock or dirt?

How far removed those things seem, despite their voices still out there, somewhere upon the surface of the water, remembered only by my daughters who cry out in the yip of the coyote, the slither of the snake, the rustle of oak and fern.

Now there is only me, floating after them in the dark.

Now only me and also this barge, built from the flotsam and jetsam that bumped into my sunken home, and above me only these clouds, and around me only this rain, which I must bail every second I am not steering, not sinking my pole toward some hopeful bottom.

All this, so someday I might walk again on dry land, so I might stand before my three wife-voiced daughters, so I might tell them that I am not mad anymore.

That although they have cost me everything, I will not punish them.

That because everything they took from me was all they had themselves, they have already been punished enough.