This is a piece of flash fiction I wrote one morning after waking up from a very vivid dream. I edited this piece with my mentee, and together we puzzled over the ways in which it fit within the theme of Generation F.
The house was flooding. It was breaking open from the inside, water pooling at the edges, leaking into every nook and cranny, every crack and crevice. She’d tried to stop the water from seeping in through the pores of the walls and floors. They’d all tried paper towels and newspapers at first, when it was just leaks, just little dribbles of liquid. A broken pipe, perhaps. Something benign. Fixable. It was an old row house, stacked against its neighbors like a thick slice of deli meat, with its predictable design and stout, simple layout. It was at least fifty years old, if not older. Things happened. Especially in old houses. But as the hours wore on, the leaking got worse and worse, and they found themselves scrambling—all five of them, the mother, the father, the two sons, and the one young daughter—and the dog, of course, the dog was frightened, barking its head off and running around as if the world were on fire. And the mother found herself covering her face with her hands and murmuring and crying out, shuttling the dog and the children out onto the street, and it was then that they realized the entire street was flooded, all of the row houses cracking open like raw eggs, the water steadily rising under their feet. And they had to get out, they had to, because the floodwaters were drowning the house, and no matter how hard they tried they knew they couldn’t stop the water.
And so it came to be, long after the family had been taken away on an emergency boat to some other place, long after the mother had cried and mourned and moaned for her house, for her many things—her home that she’d built and labored over and loved, all those photographs and irreplaceable objects that feel so permanent before you lose them. After the children had stopped crying and the mother had stopped blaming herself for something she could not have stopped, there existed a long night, a still night, a black sky with burning silver stars, and beneath the stars there was a great water, long and expansive, like an ocean, murky and deep. A submarine hung below the surface, examining the sunken row houses, a soft blip-blip coming from the great machine, and there was no light but from the moon and stars, and everything else in the world was silent.