Electric Waters

The lightning struck somewhere beyond the ridge as I knelt in the flooded garden, my hands wrist-deep in mud that smelled of childhood summers and endings. Three weeks since Sarah's funeral, and I was finally clearing out what she'd started—these damned spinach plants she'd nurtured through drought, now drowning in the storm we'd both seen coming months before it arrived.

Her dog, Buster, watched me from the porch. The old golden retriever had stopped waiting for her key in the lock sometime last week, which somehow hurt worse than when he'd spent every evening pressed against the door, her collar still draped over his neck like a rosary.

"You can stay out here," I told him, but he just sighed and rested his chin on his paws.

The water kept rising, higher than it had in thirty years. Sarah had known—she'd measured these things, tracked weather patterns like they were clues in a mystery she was solving. She'd filled notebooks with data: flood levels, soil composition, the precise amount of moisture spinach needed before it surrendered to rot. She'd known the levee wouldn't hold, just like she'd known the cancer would win.

"You're in denial," she'd told me gently, the morning she finally stopped chemotherapy. "About the levee, about my prognosis, about how water always finds the weak point."

She'd been right about everything, including the levee. Now the Mississippi was claiming our backyard, inch by muddy inch, taking her garden with it. The basil had gone under first, then the tomatoes. Now only the spinach remained, those elegant leaves she'd grown from heirloom seeds, still proud and green as the water swallowed them whole.

I pulled up the last plant, its roots tangled with something harder—a metal box, buried beneath the vegetables. Sarah's time capsule, the one she'd made me promise not to open until the spinach died. Another joke, another riddle from the wife who'd spoken in puzzles even as she was dying.

Inside: a single silver key, a photograph of us on our wedding day, and a note. *The dock downtown. The boat's name is Bull. He knows where the levee breaks first. Go before the water rises further.*

I'd never heard of a boat called Bull. But then, there was a lot I hadn't known about Sarah—including the fact that she'd spent our savings not on a vacation fund, but on something that could float us both away from a town that had been slowly disappearing for decades.

"Come on, Buster," I said, and for the first time, he stood up and walked toward me. "We're not drowning here."