How Turkeys Drown in the Rain, or Three Floods

Teresa puts a wilting rose in a sea green bottle and admires her handiwork shortly thereafter. She looks outside her window and sees you looking in at her. The water is up to your chest and you are gulping in air as though practicing for when it will consume you. Teresa doesn’t quite laugh to herself, but she makes a little noise indicating that she thinks where you are is the result of your choices and nothing else. We try to tell her that you have amnesia, but she doesn’t believe it. Don’t take it personally. She doesn’t believe in amnesia on the whole, not just in your case. She thinks all conditions of the mind are a moral deficiency although you would be wrong to assume she’s religious. She’s judgmental, but not religious. Religion would ask compassion of her, whereas simply deciding that she’s better than other people allows her to look down on them without ever feeling as though she needs to lend a hand. The rose sits nicely in the bottle. She will have a prevailing day.

In the bathroom, she shaves off the four or five hairs that gather on her right cheek. She tells herself that this will be the year she gets electrolysis, but for so few hairs, it seems extravagant. Can she afford electrolysis? We check her bank statements and remind her that she’s in arrears, but she doesn’t know what that means and assumes we’re saying something off-color. Turning on the hot faucet, she decides that she wants to know how long it’ll take for the hot water to run out so she lets the water run. It quickly overflows and spills onto the bathroom floor. Teresa is unaffected by water unless it’s for bathing. She drinks it and drinks it and drinks it and the doctors still say she’s dehydrated so she goes back to vodka sodas and cold brew and white wine poured over ice into a glass so it’s not watered down. We tell her that you’re standing outside trying to remember how you got there, and she thinks to herself that one day the world will be covered in water and she’ll be fine, because it will go around her like Moses in the Red Sea. The water from the sink has traveled from the bathroom into the living room and she recalls a joke about how turkeys drown in the rain.

Teresa’s daughter comes home from school with a note saying something about vomiting. She informs her that she needs to ignore the water pooling from the bathroom into the living room (and now the kitchen) and to ignore you outside even though your daughter is worried that you’ll drown (you will) if someone doesn’t do something. All the worry aggravates her stomach, and she begins (sure enough) to vomit. Because she hasn’t eaten in several years, the vomit is clear. It’s nothing but water, because Teresa insists on keeping her hydrated. She vomits for nearly ten minutes and when she’s done, the vomit water has mixed with the bathroom water and become a single body of water that is nearly two feet high. When Teresa’s husband gets home, he will make a snide comment about how she’s raising their child and the kind of house she keeps. Then he will go outside and offer you a scuba-diving mask, but it won’t do much good. Teresa asks her daughter if she’s feeling better, and she lies and says that she is. Teresa sends her up to her room so that her hair doesn’t get wet.

Outside, you see the water filling up Teresa’s home and a short story pops into your head about a house that filled with water. Did everyone in the house die? You never finished the story, so you don’t know how it ended. You’re shaking with the onset of hypothermia and the moon looks so full above you. Why does it have to get dark so early? A squirrel swims by you and it’s the first time you’ve ever seen a squirrel swimming. Your teeth tap out a rhythm that’s almost pleasant. Inside the house, Teresa is playing Dean Martin on her phone. She’s placed the phone on top of the refrigerator so it won’t get wet, but it will if she doesn’t turn the water off. Upstairs, her daughter begins to vomit again. She doesn’t want to get it on the nice things in her bedroom so she opens up her window and vomits down from the second floor. The stream and intensity of her vomit looks to you like a waterfall and you try to see it as something beautiful rather than horrifying. We apologize to you for how this has all turned out. It’s not just that you’re going to drown. It’s that vomiting is so disgusting even if it is a natural bodily function, and we’re embarrassed to be associated with a story that would include something like a vomit waterfall, but here we are.

Inside, we request that Teresa turn the music down, but she will not. When her husband gets home, she wants him to hear the music and see the water and understand that nothing has ever been under control. She puckers her lips like she’s trying to equitably distribute lipstick even though she isn’t wearing makeup and never has. Somewhere in the water, she thinks she sees something that looks like justice, but what does justice look like? An unjust world is a world that drowns its living creatures. An unjust god only gives one man and his family a boat and lets everyone else die because they’re sinners. Teresa knows she’s not a sinner and that’s why the water won’t touch her. That’s why she’s bone dry while her daughter’s small body wracks itself to continue pumping out water and you stand outside unable to save yourself and we find ourselves stuck talking to Teresa even though she won’t talk back. She goes into the bathroom and turns off the water, but it will take some time before it finds a way to exit the house completely. While she waits, she thinks about what she’ll cook for dinner. It’ll take her a minute or two to land on turkey, but when she does, she’ll become excited. A turkey dinner and a nice cozy night while the full moon engages the rising flood and you’re standing outside only remembering short stories you didn’t finish and friends you betrayed and the word “suffocation,” but not your name. Not how you wound up where you wound up. Not how to move. Not how to get away. Not what time you were supposed to be home from work. Nothing like that.

Do you at least remember how turkeys drown in the rain? It should be obvious, shouldn’t it? But then again, obvious things are usually the first things we forget.