BY Justin Carter
All through June the water rose. Neighborhood by neighborhood we fled, at first because
the mayor asked nicely and then, later, because she asked more forcefully, because she told us the
city wouldn’t be responsible for anything that happened if we stayed. No emergency responders. No
access to electricity once the rising river knocked out the transformers. No way to protect us from
sewage, snakes, whatever else lurked in the water that overtook us.
Eventually, the rains stopped. The river peeked and, finally, began to recede, and we started
to return to these homes. For some of us, there was a shell to return to, something that could be
rebuilt over time. For others, the foundation would be too warped—they’d file reports with FEMA,
hope they’d get back something that could help them start their lives over again. They’d move in
with family, or into apartments, three siblings crammed into one room.
And then there was our neighborhood. Fifteen homes in-between the river and a small
branch of the petrochemical plant—the kind of place where the sky was never dark, the stars always
blocked out by the burn off from the towers. A kind, my mother had always told me, of presence
there in the sky, a reminder that it would only take one thing going wrong to wipe us away from this
place.
Our homes had survived, the water making its way inside but only rising a few inches. But
when we returned, we found the homes occupied. By the bugs and snakes we expected, yes, but also
by something else, these creatures covered head to toe in coarse hairs, so thick that hardly anything
else showed. At first, we were afraid, but when they did not kill us, we moved closer. They were
voiceless. When we asked them questions—who are you, where did you come from, were you
someone we once knew, someone changed forever by the waste run-off, the chemicals—they
grunted. We asked them to shake our hands if they remembered us and they refused to move. We
asked them to blink twice if they had families and they closed their eyes. We asked them to leave and they walked into another room. We offered them sweet tea and they drank it down in one gulp.
They showed a kind of wildness that intrigued us but, too, a kind of civility that kept us from
removing them by force. They were sad and lost, and so were we.
For the first month, we let them stay in whichever rooms we hadn’t finished repairing. They
seemed content to sleep on the floor, covered in wool blankets. No one in the neighborhood
contacted any authorities, worried they’d be taken away, prodded, dissected. They weren’t hurting
anyone. They were becoming, in a way, our friends, and we couldn’t turn our friends in, couldn’t
give them over to a system we had no faith in. Besides, they seemed to be learning. They sat at the
dinner table. They watched television and went to bed at a reasonable hour.
It was my father who suggested we build them tiny houses in the backyard. They could live
there. Maybe, he said, they could do some chores for us to pay back the construction costs. Or, my
mother replied, we wouldn’t exploit them like that. We’d build them homes because they were
family now, because it was the right thing to do. They owed us nothing. Still, we wondered how long
this could be sustained. When FEMA finally did come to help with things, would they find the
creatures? Take them away? How long could we hide them? Even the homes we were building—
there’d be no permits. If someone chose to move away one day, would the building inspectors
come? We couldn’t keep this secret forever. We couldn’t always protect them.
The neighborhood held a meeting. We needed, my father said, a long term plan. We were
wasting our time with these structures. We weren’t building experts. They’d move into them, hurt
themselves. And the government was coming later in the week to start assessing damages. They’d
find them. We had to, he said, let them go, even if it wasn’t the right thing to do. Some neighbors
protested—it’s like, one said, kicking a child out—but it was decided they had to leave. It was to
protect them, my father said. If they stayed, they’d be captured. This was their only chance.
That night, we took them outside and locked our doors. We yelled out the windows for
them to leave. That it was for their own good, that if they stayed, their bodies would be poked apart,
all of them sacrificed in an attempt to understand them. We told them to stay out of sight. Use the
woods. We told them all this and woke the next morning hoping we’d look outside and they
wouldn’t still be there, waiting for us to reopen the door.
Justin Carter's first book, Brazos, is forthcoming in 2024 from Belle Point Press. His poems and short fiction have appeared in Booth, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.