Story: Drownings (part one)

Drownings

(part one)

While the world was buying nothing, and working at nothing, the city underwent its heart-rot.

Apartment houses ceased to cohere. Not in respect of fellowship, the residents still and always pleased to avoid each other. But the bricks and beams themselves, consequent to a spiraling, so many lines of decay caught as arms of the vortex, drawn to a common center.

A few in these rooms had money for heat and ran it; others with no spur to unbundle from their beds in the mornings, allowed the rooms of neighbors to preserve their own.

Toilets once flushed in the sync of employed lives now burdened drains at odd times. Ovens ran incessantly with windows cracked. Walkers came home from the fruitless rattling of knobs and stomped pounding buttons before slow lifts. Doors slammed. They slammed when marriages broke, slammed volcanically when tenants were evicted. Buildings swayed to this different pattern of vibration; their breathing, through stairwells and shafts, became a wheeze. Hot water ran in chilled pipes, rain worked through window-joins, concrete fissured, frames skewed under torque, and welds began to weaken.

Structures misted by fogs occupied their horizons in lonely twos and threes. The fogs seemed fed by the clouds of collapse. Bulldozers piled debris onto barges; the barges were grounded to flank the river’s mouth. The city said this protected Harborhead homes from the new storm bores.

Harborhead, called a community, was rich in mansions, in doglegging uphill drives, in pools, terraced gardens. The rich were angry at their sea views uglified.

Someone was rafting out at night to set the barges on fire.

Patrol boats and their scoping lights were added to the mix.

And then there were the bodies in the river.

The question was whether any of the drowned mattered.

“How easy?” McAlley asked his companion.

“Authority worships authority. If a detective brings a friend, how can they say no? She might recognize a jacket or a head of hair. No one goes around with special proofs they know a person.”

McAlley tapped her wool-coated elbow, hovered behind on the towpath, operated as a guardian with this privilege of touch, while he kept himself from knowing Faia so well she lost her angel status. She had a bare face and frowning eyes, hair grown to any length coming through her scarf onto her collar.

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Drownings

Drownings (part two)

(2021, Stephanie Foster)