IT WAS a holiday. She wanted to go down by the water to a fountain she liked at one side of the park, a large marble circle like a manhole cover cut ground level, with eight spouts on the edge, water shooting clockwise arcs. She told him after the flood dropped in some houses there was a stain of waterline five feet up on the walls. She said the paper ran a detailed list of things people found in their houses; dead fish, tires, a washing machine, trees, a blue bicycle, fence posts, license plates from Indiana and Tennessee, a human jawbone with six teeth, bloated deer, mailboxes, barbed wire, a headlight, a dropped telephone pole through a first floor window, a small black bear, the hair still damp, laid on its side. One of the cemeteries, even, turned mud, and the black water raised coffins, hung them ornaments in the trees.

They timed it, moved between bursts gone overhead like the paths of electrons and stood on the wet marble, the water a gray mirror skin beneath their shoes. She kept her eyes up. The light bent through the water, and the water and the light beaded her face. She said she never saw anything like it even though she came there before.

A helicopter beat slow in the blue overhead, and carried, at its belly, hung from cord attached to the legs, a gray bridge piling. Flags limped near the water and then puffed in the wind. The silver poles waxed in the bright light, the rope joints banged against the metal.