Mayflies by Sara Veglahn Read Free Book Online

galoshes. As they waited for the storm to end, they shared a cigarette and periodically passed a small bottle of brandy from which they took small sips. They did not speak to or look at her. They sat silent and gazed at the ceiling in an effort to determine whether it was safe to go back upstairs.
    After several hours they all fell into an uneasy rest. Their dreams were filled with floods and flickering lights and they woke with their feet sitting in an inch of dirty water. After their initial alarm they climbed the stairs, wavering on each step, and opened the cellar door to a dim morning where no birds sang. The house remained. All the windows were intact, the roof had not been lifted, the trees still stood. It was as if nothing had happened.

    She went to the bridge mostly in the evenings, when the lights of the bridge and the headlights of the cars would illuminate the water below—a radiance unachievable in the daytime. She felt heavy and unmovable, observing for hours what seemed impossible: the graceful way the bridge maintained its structure.

    Dead fish it was rotting mud and insects and we went walking there nights the impossibility of really being down in it, fish smell, reaching the bottom, dead fish, mud and insects, because the bottom was impossible we went there walking deep with mud whatever night in summer it was down there, something different than in history, a catfish, it never froze but hovered slowly suspended, a slime, scales like armor if you were ancient and submerged yourself in it and called to the past, you couldn’t get the smell right, we weren’t a part of this it was more than mud that got into everything.

    From her room in the tall green apartment building next to the alley, she watches snow fall. There is a small light shining from the top window of the red apartment building across the street from her and a suggestion of movement. Someone there is taking off a coat, a hat, placing a pair of gloves upon the radiator to dry. This person is only a torso and head from where she sits watching on her wide windowsill, sipping steaming broth, her feet enclosed in wool socks, the steam from the broth and her breath making steam on the window. Outside, in the small postage stamp park between the buildings, two people wearing navy blue parkas are running around making patterns in the fresh snow. They yell and chase each other. Several times, one reaches out a hand in an effort to capture the other.

    On the day in January when all water is holy, they plunged a heavy anchor adorned with red and white carnations into the river. A man—a priest or minister, I don’t know who— stood and spoke. From where I was, I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He held his hand up to the sky and faced the half-frozen water. His red and white robe whipped in the winter wind. As the anchor lowered his voice took on the cadence of song. It was rhythmic and slow. It was old and ancient. It seemed familiar.
    The crowd dispersed after the anchor disappeared. No one said a word as they moved away from the river. The priest or minister sat on the levee. He had exchanged his robe for a parka, the hood making a fuzzy frame around his face. I watched him sit there in the dark gray day—the clouds heavy, a bitter wind.
    I turned to walk home and saw one of the carnations floating near shore. I clambered down to the water’s edge and pulled it from the water. I turned to make sure no one saw me. I do not know why I did this.

    She has a dream where she is shot by several bullets from a small gun. She can’t stop dreaming this dream. She tries to catch the bullets with her hands, but her hands are hooves and the bullets too fast. The bullets lodge deeply into her throat. Every time it is the same. A small gun hovers in her peripheral vision, the bullets are released without a sound, and her hands turn to hooves. No one else is there. There is only the gun. It shoots automatically. The gun