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| KIMBERLEY H. WILT is a high school teacher in a small town and has published various things in equally small regional magazines. |
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| "waterlogged" Possom Kingdom Lake. The very name is decadent, like road kill about to burst in the late evening heat of an Indian Summer. Percy had spent the last 41 years living in a cottage along side the southeast portion of the lake. When he was 11, his mother moved him out of the town of Pickwick to the little shotgun shack he currently occupies. Over the course of three months, he and his mother watched from the porch as his deserted hometown was quietly submerged in water. "Good riddance," his mother said once the water reached the top of the tallest stone chimney. She looked out over the acres of desirable temperate water as she lifted herself from the stoop. Her eyes were cold and rheumy as the glanced down at him. "Good riddance." It wasn’t the town she was bidding a bitter goodbye to. **** Whenever Percy sits on his front porch and looks out over the expanse of the blue in front of him, he tries to remember the layout of the town. He tries to imagine what his boyhood home looks like encapsulated by that vast amount of liquid. He was never the most creative sort, so the image in his mind comes out like a cartoony version of the Titanic expedition he saw once of the Discovery Channel. The vision has his house covered in an icing-like glaze of muck… yet everything inside is just as they left it, he and his mother. The inside never changes. Overturned chairs. A broken plate or two. Shattered glass from the door of the corner cabinet. A requiem for a dream deferred. A few years after the flooding of the town, Percy mentioned this vision to his mother while the watched the sun setting on Possum Kingdom Lake. "Jesus, Percy! Going on like that I’m prone to think my son is so dumb that he couldn’t slap his own butt with both of his hands," she said in an exasperated manner. "You know very well that the force of the water had to move stuff around. Who knows if the house as we know it is even still standing." "Shouldn’t we hope that the house is still standing, Momma?" **** Percy sits on the stoop of his porch thinking of something he heard on the radio about the water table dropping due to the drought, or global warming, or something more sinister. He had an inkling that bad times were afoot when he noticed what looked to be a stone formation appearing from the center of the lake a few weeks ago. Now he could clearly make out a stone chimney. Percy shakes his head. Nothing, not even skeletons over forty years old stay buried. He looks back at the stone chimney and wonders if anyone will say anything when they find his father. ### |
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