Friday, 31 August 2012

• The Flood

  Put a some original Twilight Zone in my mind, add some big dollops of Isaac and Louisiana and a breaking damn, and hit frappe.  What you end up with is what I dreamed last night.  Even now I'm having trouble recalling it all but it seems I was in this isolationist community that lived in a big crater overlapping the ocean.  So we had rugged white stone cliffs going 3/4s of the way around us and a white sandy beach.  But it was big and most of it was planted with crops and flowers.  There were a group of utility buildings and a day care in the center and homes built Anazazi style into the cliffs.

  I was in my apartment high up on one of these cliffs when I saw a wide crack appear running vertically on the opposite cliff.  I thought something totally inane like 'Oh, we're hatching now,' and then I panicked as the reality hit me (dream reality that is - not necessarily the same as reality, reality).  The side of the crater was cracking open.  Steam or mist arose from there as the cracks widened, and then, with a full throated rumble and roar, it became a giant waterfall, throwing huge boulders in its wake as the water spread out on the flat crater floor and fought its way too easily through our fragile lives on it way to the sea.

  For the first few awestruck moments I could only stand a stare, slack jawed at it though my picture window.  Then, like a numbskull, I just went on automatic, drifting aimlessly around my apartment with baskets and boxes collecting up my favorite things to move with.  Didn't know where I was moving to, just that there was this sense of now it's time to move and I can't take everything so I'll just take absolutely needful or favorite things.  I loaded up on food, toiletries, and books.

  I kept tripping over toys though, so I added them too.  The kids will want these Barbie dolls.  The kids will want these Matchbox cars.... 

  It was a trigger of course.  I did not live with any children.  I was there, as now, an empty nester but also a grandmother.  Grand kids would come to visit and they'd want their toys. OMG!  There are children clustered at the center of the crater and the river's going to wash them all away!!!! 

  I dropped everything and ran out of my apartment and down the stairs to the crater floor, which was already ankle deep at the edge of the cliffs and getting deeper further down where the children and their keepers were fleeing upwards from.

  I slogged my way through the roughening water to them only to find it was deepening behind me as well and herding them back toward the cliffs might not be the best thing to do.  To do so was to push against a steadily increasing strong current that was pushing us away toward the sea.

  I'm okay with accepting when I cannot willfully change something.  Everyone joined hands, the adults swinging the littlest ones up between us, and let the water push us up onto a rock outcropping finally, that bridged the space between crater and sea, a narrow strip only 2 or 3 feet wide that went all across the opening.  The water rose to our ankles there but no higher.

  We knew what we would do.  We would wait for low tide and then walk together around the entrance/exit of our crater-cum-bay then climb up outside the rocky escarpments that had so long sheltered us and face the outside world.  That was a quivering in the pit of the belly sort of prospect, but we could see no choice.

  Except for me.  I woke up of course.

  • 12:46 PM
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