Photo by Danilo Batista on Unsplash
The fish aren’t in their tank. They were there this morning, Adeline recalls—and they aren’t exactly small, so she has no idea what happened between now and then. She imagines that the water filter may have sucked them up, but one of them would’ve gotten stuck. Taking off her rubber gloves and placing them in the bucket with her bathroom cleaning supplies, she inspects the area further. The carpet is dry. None are floating on the water, dead. And they aren’t inside their castle, stuck in the filter, or under the pebbles, so where did her fish go?
Adeline had been running around the house for hours. Saturday is cleaning day. She doesn’t blame herself for not noticing her missing fish earlier, but she can’t remember when she saw them last. Thinking back to the start of the day, she recalls that she stopped handwashing the dishes when a stream of black water spurted through the faucet. At the time, she had assumed the construction workers from two blocks down did something to the pipes. After looking through the window above the sink at the row of pine trees in her backyard, watching the winds sway and rip their roots from the mud, she had realized that it may be because of an incoming flash flood. Crouching before the tank, her nose brushing the glass in search of her fish, she remembers deciding to clean upstairs first and wait for the pipes to clear up—the fish were definitely in their tank then.
That morning, she had fed them three pinches of fish flakes, one pinch per fish. After receiving them as a condolence gift after her kids died that winter, the sender wrote on the card that if goldfish have room to grow, they will. It’s cruel, apparently, to keep goldfish contained in a small bowl. The sender also wrote that fish are a good investment for her peace of mind, that watching them swim is addicting and can cause a hypnotic effect, where the viewer doesn’t realize they’ve been staring at fish for hours. And so, she took the fish in and named them according to what her kids might have wanted to call them: the all-orange one Kai, the white-and-gold marbled one Cake, and the one with black specks Willow. As she had watched them eat that Saturday morning, she thought they weren’t doing what the sender intended for them to do since she felt more stressed. Maybe she needed a bigger tank with more animals. Maybe she should get a snail. Or a tiny crab.
After feeding her fish, she drank water from the tap. It was thick and gritty and reminded her of tar. The taste lingered on her tongue for the rest of the morning. It increasingly grew worse as she cleaned—vacuuming all three bedrooms upstairs, tracing the shadows from her previous cleaning day, being meticulous with moving the beds and end tables to vacuum underneath before moving them back to their original positions and vacuuming the disturbance away—all the while, her tongue couldn’t help but rub against the inside of her mouth and spread the roughness of the tap water, coating her tongue, to create sore spots on her cheeks. When she finished vacuuming, she counted three.
The fish were still in their tank when she had put the vacuum away.
Or at least she had thought they were. She had only glanced at the tank before finishing her chores. Now she wonders if she ever did see them. Going downstairs after discovering their disappearance, she takes a swig of spiced rum from the bottle, wishing it’ll kill the texture on her tongue and hope that her senses will bleed back into reality. She takes a few more sips until she can only taste the spice then goes upstairs.
For the next hour, she deconstructs the tank in case they’re lost somewhere. They’re not. Annoyed at the emptiness, she thinks about where the fish could have disappeared to. Puffing out her cheeks, she lifts the tank and hauls it to the bathroom to dump the water in the tub, and then she brings the empty tank downstairs. Outside the sliding porch door, she takes three steps and slowly sets it on the ground, careful not to slip on the freshly fallen rain. Near the end of the yard, before the roots of the pine trees, is a large body of water that resembles a lake. The pine trees submerged in, what looks like, more than six feet of water.
On her tiptoes, she checks over the fence to see how bad her neighbor’s damage is, but there’s no sign of a flood. Strange, she thinks, how it’s only contained in her yard. She crosses her arms, wondering if her house may be more sunken into the ground than her neighbor’s, and if it’s always been like that. Overlooking the lake in her backyard, she can’t help but remind herself of the painting in her living room. The one she got out of her deceased mother’s will two months ago. Her mother had loved that painting. It reminded her of her mother’s home in Korea. It’s a large oil painting above her fireplace that shows a straw hut on a cliffside, with sheets drying on a clothesline in the wind; on the lower right side, there’s an ocean reaching far out into the horizon with a large boulder closer to the viewer, where a farmer sits with one leg extended before him, fishing. The colors are pale and vibrant where it counts, but the allure is how the clouds blur the scene, like a fog. She finds the painting peaceful. She hopes the farmer feels that, too.
At the edge of the newfound lake, Kai suddenly jumps into the air like a flying fish, followed by Cake and Willow.
They’re the size of sharks.
Adeline gazes at their large size, imagining what happened. It couldn’t be the food she fed them earlier. They jump in the air again in a line, as if playing tag. These can’t be her fish—hers aren’t jumping fish. Do goldfish jump? She’s never seen them do tricks. She lightly slaps both of her cheeks a couple of times until colors appear, checking if she’s in reality. The fish are still there. And her mouth tastes worse.
Hiding her panic, she paces to the kitchen and swigs more of her spiced rum to coat her tongue in spice and coughs. She thinks about the fish and how it might be due to stress, that she’s hoping that they’re okay. With another sip, she wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. Her hands are cold. And shaking. Putting the bottle down, she grips her hand into a fist and goes back outside to see what exactly is going on with her fish, but the tank is missing, and she can’t find the fish under the murky water with the sun low on the horizon. She throws her hands out, frustrated that she’s lost them again. A dorsal fin peeks out from the top of the water. Kai leaps into the air with the fish tank in her mouth, followed soon by Cake and Willow. Adeline wants to call out to them, tell them to stop and to shrink back into their normal sizes so they can go inside again, but she feels paralyzed.
They jet through the yard and circle the perimeter. Kai jumps in the air, fish tank still in her mouth, and hurls the tank at the basement window. Water funnels through the open hole, sucking Cake and Willow with it. Swimming back and forth, Kai slams herself against the fence, trying to escape. When it doesn’t budge, she slaps the wood with her tail fin in defeat.
With Kai seeming to be okay, Adeline rushes to the basement. Near the bottom of the steps, she touches the water and shrieks. It surprised her, the iciness. As she continues, the water rising higher up her legs with her descent, she hears violent splashes below. Soon, her shivering stops when her feet finally touch the smooth concrete floor. She moves a yard forward and tugs at the pull chain to turn on the light. The water is dirtier in her basement, almost resembling a swamp, as if the water from her pipes is the source and not the rain. To the left is a storage unit containing empty boxes for children’s toys she had purchased years ago, ones she had wanted to return before the refund date expired and ended up donating them instead.
She turns toward the large part of the basement below the living room where she expects to see a small box of stuffed animals she couldn’t part with. Inside the box are their favorite toys: a matted cat, with a bead inside its body to act as a rattle when thrown against a wall, or tossed in the air; a three-year-old-sized talking Pooh Bear, where if its belly is pressed, says things like you’re my favorite pal, I wuv you, and oo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo; and a small, bead-filled turtle named Sheldon that doesn’t have many beads anymore, and is instead filled with fabric from a ripped T-shirt. They’re soaked, stained in its black tar-like substance to the point where restoration would make the tattered toys lose their value. Adeline pauses before the box watches as it sinks.
Water pours in from the broken window like a geyser. As she gets approaches the low lighting, she recognizes Cake and Willow floating. When they get hungry, they like to hover near the top, their fins and backs peeking out of the water in expectation, but they’re dead. Rising with the current, their bodies swim toward her as the tide pushes Adeline forward. Their bodies stir in the water—Willow’s jolts vigorously like a dog fighting for victory in tug-o-war before going under.
Above the water, Cake remains unmoving. It has risen to the point where Adeline balances herself on her toes, the waterline below her chin, her body still being pulled with the current. Something brushes her legs. Out of instinct, she turns to see what it is. A long, scaly beast submerges.
Adeline runs, her toes barely scratching the concrete. Pumping her arms, she swims her way toward the storage unit. Something chomps at flesh behind her, squishing the water and Willow’s meat together. It splashes aggressively. Her breath is heavy, and she’s terrified that she could have been the monster’s victim. If she was closer, it would’ve been. With shaking lips and water sloshing into her mouth, spitting out either the swamp water or the tar-like water from the pipes, with each exhumed breath, she whimpers. She’s swimming too slowly. It’ll catch up to her. It’ll get her.
As she presses forward to Cake, her massive body becomes more real to Adeline. She has grown. She is much, much bigger. Massive, almost. Through the window, her gold and white scales beam in the setting sun, like a kaleidoscope behind Adeline’s tears. Majestic. Her tears flow as the water rises and until her toes don’t touch the floor, she thinks how she should’ve found peace with her fish. That she should’ve enjoyed their presence—allowed herself to be entranced by them.
Out of the corner of her eye are large bits of fish meat floating. One after the other, the beast sucks them under. With her legs kicking to keep her afloat, Adeline swims toward the stairs. Soon, the beast pulls Cake under and tears her flesh apart, chunks of her gut splashing water onto the back of Adeline’s head as she swims. When chaos hesitates, it’s just for a moment, and it’s a trick. The closer she gets to the stairs, the slower she swims. Whether it’s from sporadically swimming or from terror, she doesn’t know. The water is inches from the ceiling.
Biting down on her ankle, hard enough to pull, she gets dragged back into the depths of the basement. As she kicks and screams, suffocating on the edge of the water, it lets go. She doesn’t know where it went, but the room is silent. Aside from her chitters of fear and the water spurting in from the broken window, there’s nothing.
Victorious in her escape, she pulls herself through the basement door using the railing to propel her onto the ground floor at the top of the stairs. She struggles to push the basement door shut. The waters have touched the bottom of the door to the ground floor and push against it from shutting. With her body leaning against the door, and one foot pushing on the wall behind her, she manages to push it closed. It doesn’t stop the flood, however, as it gushes through the its open slit.
Outside, the rain has picked up again, pouring. Quickly, water rises. The weight of herself once again grows lighter, the waterline now above her thighs. She treads through the water toward the second set of stairs. On the ascension, she notices the oil painting above her fireplace. It brings her a sense of peace—as if the flooding waters are a part of the scene. It’s constant, the painting. Unchangeable. It brings her back to reality for a moment. In that instance, she thinks the painting as serene because it’s the one thing that has stayed normal.
Upstairs, Adeline runs to the window. The street isn’t flooded, and she wonders if she imagined it all, yet her soaked clothes and missing fish suggest otherwise. Deciding to trust her instincts, she runs through the long hallway and into the room on the right, pulls down the attic steps from the ceiling, and ascends farther.
Her attic, filled with cobwebs between piles of wood that she meant to use for renovations or repairing broken chairs, their legs missing or their stained seats uneven and cracked, seemed much smaller now without any boxes that used to hold her children’s winter clothes. Knocking them behind her, she forces her way through the window that leads to the roof. Stepping back, she notices empty hangars on racks, some on the ground and some hanging off others by the hook. She felt sad in this moment, remembering that, in a blind rage, she tore her family’s clothes off those hangars, and instead of washing and exchanging them out with the winter clothes in the closet for spring, she threw them out of the very window she was trying to escape from.
With three strong and slow kicks, she knocks it out of the frame. Sticking her head out, she notices again that the street isn’t flooded. The rain stopped again, and this time she thinks it’s permanent—the clouds have departed from the skyline, allowing the sunset to shine through. She could go back downstairs, try to breathe in the water, act as if it was never in existence. Or she could call a neighbor, ask them if they see the flood in her backyard. Though none of these options seem appealing to Adeline. She chooses to climb to the roof.
Slipping on the surface, her toes press deeper into the tiles, gaining traction. She climbs to the center of the roof. Now safe, she can finally grasp what the flood has become. Her backyard has transformed into a fish tank. The fences act as a glass wall, containing the water. Adeline turns to the front, inspecting other neighbor’s yards, but theirs isn’t flooded. With a sigh and a shiver, searches for Kai in her backyard fish tank. She swims around with more space than ever it seems, but she has grown even larger.
Adeline still feels the grittiness in her mouth and wishes it would go away, but when she sits on the cold tiles of the roof, a knee hugging her chest, she realizes that she’s been gnawing at her cheeks. With a breeze blowing droplets of water on her skin, now captivated by Kai gliding against the current, she wonders if this will be her new normal.
Susan Yim is a fiction writer from the Greater St. Louis area. Currently, Susan lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico where she is the Prose Editor for Puerto del Sol and an MFA Fiction candidate at New Mexico State University. “Flood Damage” received 3rd place in the Frank Waters Fiction Award contest in 2020, judged by Ashley Wurzbacher; Drunk Monkeys is where “Flood Damage” found its forever home.
