Floating

Chemical Lane, Staten Island. Photo by Nathan Kensinger.

All the children were gone—she always checked.

The happiest moment of Cookie’s day was when she rolled down the shutters. She loved the decisive click of the lock she squeezed into place, as satisfying to her hand as to her ears.

But this evening, she did not bother to feel the joy of finishing and closing up. Instead, she pushed out the glass door stenciled with the offer of language tutoring, to watch milky water lapping at the curb. Ten centimeters or so higher, and the water would wash over. With storm systems lingering over much of the country, it had been raining hard for the past few weeks.

Egg told her not to worry so much. He said he would set an alarm for midnight and come out to check on the flooding, but Cookie suspected he’d just shut it off and go back to sleep, after re-proclaiming confidence in his masonry work. The day before, they’d paid much more than they should for bags of cement to put up a flood wall. The wall stood across the entry to the shop-house, a little higher than their knees. The few children who’d come to recent tutoring sessions had had to straddle it to get through.

“You think the water’s going to get higher?” a woman asked.

Cookie knew the raspy voice, and even in the darkness of the storm she could discern the woman’s gaunt silhouette under the awning, the bags of scavenged cans and plastic bottles at her feet as always. Cookie clasped her hands to her forehead to greet the woman with a wai.

“We’ve been lucky so far, Auntie Bow,” she said. “But who can know for sure? I told Egg this wall won’t do much if it actually floods, but he insists that it can hold back a river.”

She and Egg had never before bothered with a flood wall. When heavy rain turned streets watery—more and more often those days, it seemed—they’d put up a few sandbags, but the water had never crept more than halfway across the sidewalk before retreating.

“The rats know what’s going to happen,” Auntie Bow said. “They’re everywhere, trying to get to higher ground. Haven’t you noticed?”

Cookie hadn’t seen any more rats than the usual too many. At night, she heard them rifle through the garbage bins outside the kitchen. After she