The landlord held out a gun. Shara took it from him. She was doing the mother shtick, which meant playing the protector. The landlord didn’t know she was only six years older than me. He might rescind his offer if he knew I was a homeless orphan.
Next he presented us with an axe. “The rifle is for rats,” he said. He’d spray-tanned his face, drawing a yellow line under his chin. “Hatchet is for the roof. Wait till the water reaches the attic steps, then chop a hole in the ceiling and climb out. I’ll pick you up in the boat.”
It made sense well enough. The house standing behind us was free, so long as we kept watch over it. If kids came around and arsoned the place, it could torpedo the flooding insurance. The ocean was filling homes with seawater, and tycoons like the landlord needed their payouts.
“You have striking eyes,” he told Shara. His own eyes were hidden behind rainbow sunglasses so I wasn’t sure where he was staring. “I always know who I can trust. You have an intensity I like. You’d look good on camera.”
She gave him a long slow smile without showing her teeth. It dawned on me that the landlord wanted to sleep with her and that was why he was giving us this chance. He cocked his head at me, maybe reckoning I was not really her son. Hopefuls on the dunes prayed we’d fumble this and leave the house open for looting.
“The house is like a grave in a sense,” he said, still tilted. “It’s a monument, watching people come and go. The place brings out your inner child. Something about a beach house.”
I took in the grass growing from the gutters, the sideskew shutters, the sea teething on the driveway. The yard was marked by stakes and clothesline, and beyond that, railroad tracks arced into the waves, cutting through the wetlands like a ribbon. I never knew what to say to people like the landlord, so I kept quiet.
“We’ll take the key, please,” Shara said. The landlord dropped a chain into her palm. There were four streaks of makeup on his cheeks covering up something from way back in the day. It looked to me like fingernail scars.
“I’ll check on you,” he said. “Tally your days. Helps with paperwork.”
||||
Four days we scavenged. I dug up a throw rug. The waves delivered glass jars to our front stoop. Shara took a glossy framed painting from the swamp, a still life wrapped in foam. I tallied our days by cutting notches around the frame. Thinking back, these things did seem to appear as if curated for us, but I didn’t think it suspicious at the time.
The still life was of a kitchen table with a ceramic jug, a wine glass half-filled, and an assortment of fruit. The most remarkable feature was the faces painted into the fruit—teeth dug into the skins of apples, winking eyes in the pears, miniature scowls in every grape on the vine. It gave the sense of children lurking out of sight, giggling at their dinner table vandalism.
We hung it in the foyer. The house itself had beautiful wood fixtures, ornate paneling, and stone masonry. The walls had been deveined of wires for copper scrap. Shara found the attic by pulling a hinged hatch in her bedroom so a ladder swung down.
I didn’t know Shara well. She was superstitious. “Vultures and rats take to a cow before the wolves have even finished nowadays,” she said to me once. Strange sounds carried from her room at night and her fingers drew symbols in sand whenever she sat.
She’d adopted me in Cleveland. The city was littered with the skeletons of titan factories. One such factory was full of us orphaned hopefuls, where I spent most of my days on a cot gazing into the swooping beams where I might see a bat. Nobody wanted an adult to adopt us. We knew what they did to children.
But when Shara asked the social workers to line up teenagers for interviews, I volunteered. And when she asked, I told her. My parents had force-fed me nails and glass baked into bread and left me in a basket by the lake when I was a toddler. Thankfully, I passed the sharps without incident and fell asleep. The workers joked I looked like Baby Moses.
Maybe that was why she chose me. Maybe she wanted a companion to run off the men we heard sniffing by our tents like bears. For her part, she provided me a blanket, never tried to mercy-kill me, and we never went hungry. So I didn’t comment when she buried things—coins, a wolf claw, a bronze keychain of the Eiffel—calling them symbols of dead power.
The ocean would cover the Earth. Everyone agreed on that. Millions had migrated to the grasslands, springing metropolises overnight, but not Shara. She brought me to the sea to “ride the wheel of power.” Knowing what adults did to keep us children safe from this cruel, cruel world, her words stood my hairs on end.
|||| ||||
In the hours leading up to our first storm, the ocean receded and boys and girls ran out over the new territory. They climbed sunken chimneys of the landlord’s “Atlantis homes.” A dozen rich surfer children called Shara and I tourists, sneering. They all lived with their robber baron parents in a shared mansion.
The more modest neighbors, keeping the landlord’s other houses, welcomed us. “You’re one of us brackish now,” they said. “Give a shout.” But the nearest of their dwellings were farther away than a scream, huddled across the railroad. None had lived indoors before the landlord’s offer, and all worshiped him for his charity. One family even sculpted his bust in their yard from swamp clay.
The rich children did not mix with the brackish kids. I passed three of them as they circled an eel trapped in a tide pool, poking it with sticks till it was dead. Shara had asked me to find fish for dinner, as we had nothing left but beans. On the tide’s fringes, dying sardines floated in masses looking like steel wool. The ocean had given Shara exactly what she asked for. I filled two buckets and trotted them home.
The landlord visited our porch as we readied for storm’s landing. “I brought wine. Why not talk politics? Have you heard the military abandoned its navy at sea? Let’s drink till our teeth turn red!” We did not let him in. There was too much to do. We placed foam noodles in every room. We rolled our carpets and chucked them upstairs.
But he didn’t leave. Wherever Shara moved, the landlord’s eyes followed, as if he could see straight through the stone. She gestured for me to hand her a chair. “What does he want?” I whispered, peering over the sill as he tracked Shara down the steps.
“Your most terrible fear is inadequate,” she said. She tucked hair behind her ear, pausing, and his head snapped still. “When old powers fall, new powers rise to take their place, like crabs moving into empty shells. His power has come from crushing others, and for decades he has thrived. But the wheel no longer rolls his way.”
I nodded, watching the silver army of raindrops marching over the sea toward us. I never knew what to make of Shara’s words. She pulled the chair down the stairs, bam-bam-bam. Then she wedged it under the doorknob as the landlord gazed at her.
“I will tell a story,” he called out. “There are three things coming with the ocean. The first is a man who stole power from the gods. By the time they caught him, he’d nabbed their talents of oppression, violence, and eternal life. To punish him, the gods lit his skin with endless fire, melting it to ribbons.
“But the man was no fool. He dove into the sea, where the water quenched the flames quick as they could catch—turning the ocean to his prison. Now, he wanders the floor with the fishes, unable to leave except to die. His ruined skin billows out behind him as he walks alone, waiting for the water to rise—”
The first waves rushed up the driveway. A key slid into the front door’s socket.
“It’s MINE!” cried the landlord. “I’ll come in if I want!”
The bolt turned. There was silence, then splashing. We waited, curled into contours of shadows, but no other sound or movement came from the door. In the morning, beside the landlord’s prints, tar-black tracks small as bird feet escorted his retreat.
|||| |||| |
Buoys had caught in the porch banisters, and we left them there. The storm was no worse than expected, but it did turn our basement to a lagoon. Lizards hugged the cellar walls, but in the water below crabs thrived. Shara speared them patiently while I shot rats out the window, hoping to reduce our pest load.
Today I scored bigger game. A woodchuck sniffed railroad spikes, unaware of my profile in the window. I lined the notch on the barrel up to its throat. When I fired, the rodent ran, leaping in a great show toward a pile of car parts. I fired again, and it began running awkwardly, twisted. After the third pop, it relaxed with complaining shudders.
“Got one?” Shara asked, startling me. She leaned into my bedroom with a green crab, holding it by the shell. There were always little things about her I didn’t understand. Today she wore long brown socks and had managed to keep them dry in the basement, as if the crab had given itself to her.
“Three rats and a woodchuck.”
She nodded, letting the claw pinch her thumb. “Anything else?”
“No, but the landlord placed traps in our yard. Big steel-jaw traps.” I rubbed the little gun, a new nervous tic. “I don’t know why.”
“I think I know. During the storm, I saw . . . friends in the swamp. They resembled children but were not. They walked on their hands. The wheel is turning fast; we must make peace with trodden things. All those who have wielded power will be ground beneath the wheel. Nail the dead rats around the perimeter, kill no more, and bury anything with power you find.”
This is how I found myself hammering dead rats to trees around our property. You could pinch the limp things by the nape like you would a kitten and drive the nail through their hides. I collected tins of shark teeth, jawbones and plastic—all met by Shara’s approving nod—to bury. It seemed gifts simply tumbled out of the tide for Shara.
Others had worse luck. MISSING signs fluttered on telephone poles. The group of wealthy children had gone surfing during the storm and vanished. I’d seen so many children euthanized by poor parents that the disappearance of trust-fund brats felt closer to justice than tragedy.
“Hurricane coming,” came a voice from the swamp. I turned, clutching my final rat to nail around the property. The landlord clambered through cattails with a tote bag. “Your second storm is always easier than your first. You know, if your mother hoped to frighten looters, you could have asked for something bigger than a rat gun. I’ve got traps rated for bears.”
I shrugged, easing toward the porch, squeezing the hank of hair in my hand in case I needed to throw it at him. The landlord’s face rotated away from mine, pointing at Shara through the stones. We had taken planks of driftwood and nailed them rudely over the windows. “I had a son before,” the landlord said. “Not like you. A real son. You’re more like insurance.”
His wide mouth trembled. Without sunglasses, his eyes glittered like little mouths—cataracts were growing up in stalagmite shapes. “When the ocean rises, we’ll grow close. I’ll rescue you from the roof. There are things coming. I told you about the burning man. How about this: a lobster, caught in a trap on the seafloor. Nutrients drift by. The lobster grows, a huddled, huge thing, alone. Nothing can reach it.”
His arm rose suddenly, ripping something putrid from his bag. My woodchuck dangled by a leg—rather, some of my woodchuck. Its head and shoulders had been sliced away cleanly as a paper doll. But the carving didn’t end there. Empty tendrils in the shape of humanlike legs continued into the torso, as if a tiny man had been whittled from the carcass. “What is this?” the landlord hissed. I dropped the rat and fled.
|||| |||| ||||
The hurricane raised the water to ground level. Outside, a gale howled, but inside, Shara and I were snug. We took mugs of steam to the cellar steps and watched the lagoon rise. By nighttime, lobsters rippled across the kitchen.
“We envelop ourselves with trodden things like armor,” Shara said. “We invite them into our home. Leave some beans out for the rats in the kitchen.” She leaned so close to my face that our noses touched.
The landlord pulled at our barriers, asking sweetly for Shara to let him in. “A little company while I dry?” he chanted. “C’mon, sweetheart. I’d like to inspect the damage.”
We looked to the door. An arm slithered through a gap in the pallet we’d hammered over a window, fishing for purchase. His eye locked on us through a slit as we edged upstairs.
“The third thing coming with the ocean is a boxcar,” he said. His voice took on an ecumenical lilt, as if he were preaching through the hole. “Coming soon now. Very soon. It was pushed into the sea. Nobody knew what was inside, but they stayed well away.”
Through the window, I watched the tide undermine the robber baron mansion on the cliff and carry it off. It sailed into the bay as if nudged by a million fish. The landlord’s eyes rose with Shara’s legs, step by step. Originally, I had thought this X-Ray vision was a power of his, but understood it now as a power of hers. She made his danger predictable.
This time, when he ran, I heard the patter of feet behind him. Out the attic porthole, a figure no taller than a toddler turned to catch my eye in the grass, falling behind others of its build. It was a patchwork of things, dismembered silhouettes making a little man. Boneless legs ended in blackened meat where belly had been cut into the shape of limbs. When I saw the black grin of the woodchuck I shrunk away.
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“The landlord is in danger,” I said.
Shara’s towel-wrapped body twisted to face me. Most people would shout after being surprised straight out of the shower these days, but she merely nodded.
I pressed on. “Something—many somethings—chased him. One of them was wearing the face of the woodchuck.”
Shara glanced at me then looked away as if she’d stumbled upon something private. “Why do you think people murder their own children?” she asked at last. “If this world is too awful for the young, why not for their parents?”
I wasn’t sure. “People say parents love their children more than themselves.”
Shara’s eyes softened as she wrung out her hair. Her towel dropped and she strolled over to the wardrobe filled with all the clothes that had swirled into our home for her. “No, that is not why. Parents mercy-kill their children because their inner child was killed in a far more terrible way. Children are the most trodden things of all.”
I averted my eyes as she approached nude. “So what I saw you would call children,” I said. “Spirits of children. Friends of ours because we’ve fed rats in the kitchen and stopped eating meat. Is this why you’ve kept me around? A trodden son to use for armor?”
She touched my chin and kissed me then. “You are not my son. But you are right about this: you are a terribly trodden thing. Keep the landlord out of your mind. Until everything is upside down he will try to claw his way back to power any way he can. Beard the devil.”
I wanted to take her advice. The typhoon had changed everything. As I waded through our yard, I found a raccoon hugging a tree, mummified with silver eyes, preserved by the stinging taste of the air. The marsh had become a sea forest, the trees turned mangroves, all bones no leaves. The nailed rats had teeny men carved out of their bodies as if by cookie cutter.
I splashed down what was once our driveway and saw the mansion. It had stranded on a sand bar, inhabited now only by birds. Ahead, translucent faces glided between the mangroves, soupy fog swirling during warm breezes. Unrecognizable limbs swung by moonlight.
Things had changed. Brackish children splashed through mist. The wheel that Shara spoke about was spinning, I believed in it, this ocean inverting all in its path. There was a rise and wane to everything.
“Hey!” shouted a shrill voice, startling me. “Look!”
A brackish boy knelt, nudging something washed up on the tracks. “Get away from that,” I barked, voice raspy. It was a body, a wealthy person from the mansion, still wearing shiny dress shoes. A smaller person had been sliced out of the larger one, the absent head oversized for the gaping silhouette left in the torso.
“Want to play underwater? There’s treasure.” The brackish boy turned his waxen face on mine—the ruddy frown of a grown man—and I noticed his jerked meat arms before I screamed and he dove into the tumbling wake with a gleeful cry.
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Shara kicked a clogged carpet downstairs. It slapped the water and scattered a school of red squid along with a predatory fish that made a V on the surface. “Open the front door,” she said. “At this point it’s holding water. Let’s chase the fish back into the cellar.”
We collaborated to herd fish, lobsters, squid, crabs, and eels toward the basement. Shara paddled the water sternly with a broom. Then she guarded the door while I scooped up starfish and sea cucumbers to toss into the lagoon below.
A great wave would hit us tonight. An underwater earthquake had cut a wall of water reaching the sky, so the word went. Shara’s radio buzzed with hopefuls packing up their tents and trudging inland. The other brackish held steady, beholden to the landlord.
“I hope this wave turns out to be exaggerated,” Shara murmured, nuzzling my shoulder. “If the house goes, we have no way out but the landlord.”
“Let me scavenge,” I said. “Maybe a canoe stranded.”
She nodded, fastening a hat on my head. “Don’t take long.”
I promised to be quick. When I opened the door, water rushed out over the softened boards on the porch. The ocean had retreated in anticipation of the great wave. I could see it on the horizon—a blue mountain blending into the clouds.
I followed the railroad down to the exposed seafloor. A few vessels had sunken here, smashed to bones on Atlantis homes, but none were useable. Sagging anemones waited for their gods. Under an abandoned motorway, a barnacled railcar sat alone on the tracks, topped with a mop of seaweed. It was here I encountered the landlord.
“I told you,” he murmured, not surprised to see me. “A train holding something precious is coming with the ocean. Here is my lobster, trapped on the seafloor, safe in the prison I made for him. Have you seen those fucking things in the night?”
I approached carefully, noticing a busted lock in one of his hands and a hammer in the other. The sliding door to the train carriage was open. “Yes. The children, we call them,” I said. “I don’t know what you did in life to deserve their attention, but you should leave. Let Shara alone and make for higher ground.”
He looked at me sideways. “Shara . . . .” he said. I could see the unbidden images flashing through his mind of kissing her nipples or whatever it was he desired. Perhaps he wanted insight into the mysterious wheel. “They called me slumlord. They lived here in these Atlantis homes and I owned the whole beach. For my son, I bled them for every dollar.”
I crept closer, peering over his shoulder. There was a dark shape sitting in the box.
“I didn’t care when my tenants stopped having babies; they couldn’t afford to feed them,” he sighed. “Then I saw the first child run across the road. Next came the letters under my door. Photos of sleeping kids, rolled up in carpets, slumped over at the table, though of course they weren’t asleep. Those letters were threats. No way would I let them take my son’s birthright.”
There were tears guttered in his cheeks. Now I could see the red scars and had no doubt they had come from the fingers of a tiny person. The skeleton in the train was frozen in a yawn; it had not been dissected like the other bodies, locked away as it was. “You did it,” I realized. “You locked your son inside and pushed him into the sea.”
“He was a divine creature,” the landlord said. “Too soft for this business. He wouldn’t have protected our fortune and so I protected him. Now I start over—I take a new wife and make a new son. Trust me, I’m doing you a favor.”
I didn’t have time to react as his hammer whistled through the air onto my head, but a black pit opened and the ground rushed to meet my chin. The hammer came down again and I saw my legs insect-jerking. My mind went warm, swamped with flickers before emptiness surrounded my final confused thought.
|||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| ||||
My body lay over the salty stones.
The landlord didn’t bother to hide his crime.
The tsunami would wipe the place clean and he could ride into the future with Shara.
Uncanny figures peered around seaweed mats and from behind the wheels of the railcar. Children walking on the heels of their hands approached and touched me all over. A serrated saw rubbed my shoulders—a haunted object, the edge of a bone with holes drilled along its length.
First, they cut my head away from my arms in a straight line down toward my waist, leaving strips from my chest for arms and legs. I hardly cared about the tweaks of pain. The overwhelming sensation was of weight sloughing away, the stress of years gone. Like a snake peeling off a silvery sock of skin, it was the opposite of shedding, really, of losing something, because as strips of me fell away I gained in clarity.
With a final snap of sinew separating whittle from wood, I could see again. A jubilant, mischievous energy seized me. My limbs were ropey and light. We ran, all of us children, toward the wave. I recognized some—the rich kids who had vanished surfing. Others must have come from the Atlantis homes.
The wave will deliver something beautiful. The thought came to me unbidden as the other children, undead mouths stretching with wicked delight, raised their arms in thanks. A ship large as a town floated on the wave’s crest, carried for miles. Its shape made a leviathan shadow. We would board and let it drift us over the world twice over.
I stopped suddenly, watching the other children plink into the wall of water. I no longer wanted to dive into the tsunami. What I wanted was—
The great wave swept my legs away, swirling me toward Shara, blasting bubbles through my rubber limbs which hooked on shingles and concrete chunks and car frames and other debris. I could pump my legs along the seafloor, and when I sucked in water I jetted forward by a hole in my cratered back.
My watery talents didn’t end there. As I flew above the sand, I saw a wispy trail at head level, bubbles too fine for a normal eye to detect. When I extended an arm into this stream, I spun, caught by a current. Delighted, I leaned into the trail, shooting forward with the full force of the wave. A geyser of comfort warmed my chest when I neared the edge of our property. The feeling radiated from the mound where I had buried a tin of shark teeth days ago.
When I erupted from of the water, Shara was hoisting herself through a hole in the roof. The wave had blown out the windows and doors. She heaved up the still life, wrapped in paper to protect it from spray. The sight of her evoked a sensation I had never felt before—a mix of scent and gravity, pleasant but intense, drawing me toward her—I could only describe it as UP. I wanted to help her. She noticed me and smiled as if my carved body was of no concern.
“We need to leave,” I said. “There’s a safe place.” Indeed, not far, the gunmetal ship loomed. It may have once housed planes for military operations, but now trees grew on its deck and ferns spilled over its side. But Shara had no way to get there.
“Look at this!” howled the landlord. He was weaving the motorboat toward us, wearing sunglasses and a painted grin. He’d dabbed concealer on the gouges left by his son. If Shara emitted UP, he emitted DOWN, and the air rippled around him—fire wicked his skin. I wanted to drag him into the water. He kept one hand on the wheel but the other hovered lower. He was concealing something behind the dashboard. He had passed three other tenants without picking them up. They yelled and waved in the distance.
“Go,” Shara said sharply. “I don’t know what happens if he catches you.”
I scampered up the weathervane, desperate to find a piece of debris large enough to carry Shara. Nothing but a chair caught my eye, which wouldn’t outrun a boat.
“Lucky girl,” said the landlord, yards away. “You never gave me time of day, but here I am to rescue you. You won’t be saying no to my company, not after a couple nights at sea.”
He grasped for Shara. Then I saw them—the children, once inheritors of fortunes, gliding toward us, pushing surfboards. They’d retained their vessels after they’d died, delivering one final gift for Shara. I sprung from my perch, wrapping soaked arms around the landlord’s head.
He tore at my back. I hung on with rodeo joy. Shara knelt on a surfboard and paddled for her life. A dozen underwater hands shoved the landlord’s motorboat aboard the roof, where the propeller shattered. He was stranded.
With a pop, I had lost: he held me helpless in his arms. Milky eyes fixed on the face of the boy he had killed once already. They grew shiny till they dribbled down his cheeks, settling in his scars. “I didn’t want her to leave,” he wept. In the belly of the boat, I saw what he’d been hiding—a leghold trap.
“My son, I flew too close to the sun,” he said. “I’m sorry. I burn while I look for a way out of this ocean of grief. I deserve this. Go ahead—kill me! Turn me child as they did you!”
I twisted out of his hands and slithered into the water without a word. I cast a look back and caught his mournful gaze disappearing in a blaze. It was true he’d earned his fate. He’d spend his days trodden as an insect, and nobody would give him the gift they’d given me.
I caught Shara easily and crawled onto her craft. She balanced the painting on her hip as she rowed. “The still life is to remember you by,” she told me. “You’ve changed. But what you’ve become is still life. More life than you ever had before. We must remember that.”
She was right. My back was free from tension. When I gazed over our churning world, I only felt a sense of endless time for watching clams tuck themselves into sand, the freedom to pluck salted berries from the swamp, reliance on the beautiful sun. The thing about the canvas in Shara’s arms was that though the faces had been carved into apples, those children were no less present than if they’d been hanging on our surfboard. I’d be there too.
