Something Rising (Light and Swift) by Haven Kimmel Page B

from the ceiling, where the water had stopped. The Waterline. This room, this house, had been completely submerged. There were moments when the elements converged in such a way that this ridiculous cube, badly planned and poorly constructed, had taken on the majesty of a sunken ship, and everything inside, the silverware and the coffee cups, the floating end tables, became poignant.
    â€œWhere is Miss Cassie?” she heard Puck call. “Where is yon Cassandra? Get away from the stinky house, maiden! Be not obsessed with the stinky house!”
    Or this could be one spot, one tale, in a town that voted to flood itself. Perhaps the government had said they would no longer rebuild, no longer declare a state of emergency, your bad planning does not constitute, et cetera, and the only option the cinder-block people had was to sell. Cassie had had dreams of houses: she had a long series of dreams in which she drove along roads she recognized, a grid, and arrived finally at her house—
her
house—and there was so much to be done to repair it. The inside was filled with old furniture, debris, clothes left lying as if the Rapture had come and the righteous didn’t even get to keep their pink dresses and coveralls.
    â€œCassandra! Put down your tape measure! The cause is lost!”
    She walked into the hallway, and there was The Line. The bedrooms were also cubes, the visual representation of inner desperation,Laura would have said. In Cassie’s dream house, the front door had three stained-glass panels: on the left was a perfect rendering of a small and twisted tree. In the middle was a boy kneeling in prayer, looking up at the sky. On the right was the sky itself, deep blue, a moon, a star. And the staircase in the parlor was dangerous and wide, and led up into pure darkness, and every night she could work on only one room. So she had started at the beginning, in the parlor, its mountain of debris, the hulking old piano. She had worked all night, hauling things out to the truck and studying the damage to the hardwood floors, and before morning she had taken a sledgehammer to the disintegrating walls and discovered that the plaster was mixed with horsehair, and in her dream the hair waved through the walls like seaweed.
    â€œI know you’re in there, Cassandra! You must come out and join America’s beautiful people!”
    Mornings she felt as if she’d never slept at all, and every night she thought it was surely over, she’d never see the house again, but somehow she returned. She completed the whole ground floor, she did things she’d never attempt in real life, and all alone. The tools she needed were always within reach. Then she moved ahead, into the darkness upstairs, and everything changed again. She was confronted with nostalgia, the discomfort of studying someone else’s family photographs, trunks filled with memorabilia and rotting letters, fur coats, a contraption that might have been a birdcage and which Cassie was loath to study, a nest made of daily leavings. She had dealt with it gently, kept what she could keep, discarded the most intimate artifacts of the lost life, and she had turned the upstairs into one large room made of light, the room she would truly, standing here awake, live in if she could choose.
    â€œI’m worried about what Brian Whittaker will attempt with our Emmy! I fear his intentions are less than honorable! He’s afraid of you! Please come out!”
    One night, the final night, she had driven the now familiar roads out to the house and pulled into the driveway, and there was the wide front porch painted dark blue, and there was the front door with the boy in prayer, but when she turned the doorknob, it was locked. The back door, too, was locked, and all the windows, and Cassie with no key. And she knew it didn’t bear thinking about, how she had felt in the dream and the questions that had plagued her all the next day. Awake, asleep,