Flood, Fire, Mountain
By Liz Kellebrew
Flood
That morning I climbed out of bed and watched my neighbors. They rowed away in a boat launched from their porch. When I went downstairs, water bubbled under the carpet like boils. My Christmas tree lay on its side. No one bothered to knock on my door.
Fire
“Don’t shoot,” he said. They shot anyway. After he died, the fires burned all over Ferguson. And they spread, the country a furnace of protest. No one bothered to listen.
Mountain
The next winter, I drove through snow banks six feet high under green-blue alpine spruce. A miniature avalanche rolled down before me and I stopped. Because, red fox slender paws golden eyes! Crossing unafraid.
Flood
I sacrificed my precious books to save my one and only couch. Goodbye Tolkien, goodbye Gibran. The waters rose, gaining depth and current. Outside, someone had tied a goat to the bumper of a Land Rover. It wouldn’t stop bleating.
Fire
The weekend before Christmas, protestors shut down the mall. Seattle Times, sad children and frowning grandmothers: “Isn’t there a better way to get their message across?”
No, no there isn’t. This country loves money more than freedom. It won’t listen to anything else.
It won’t stop the bleeding.
Mountain
In the spring I hiked alone, Sunrise Trail. Wildflowers poked out of mist: Indian paintbrush, foxglove, mountain gentian. When I turned back, surprise! A female elk, my shadow companion.
She walked away, stately, a queen in leather.
Flood
At the Red Cross I stood alone, waiting in line. Families in tents, in sleeping bags, piled in every corner indoors and out. Instant Homeless: Just Add Water. They gave me a debit card to buy food and boxes.
FEMA was clueless. They came four weeks late and wanted to give me a TV to replace the one I never owned.
Fire
The Reverend Jesse Jackson came by my work. I only heard about it afterwards.
The socialist newsletter I subscribe to invited me to a protest.
More children were shot, more unarmed men killed by police.
A week later, there was a bomb threat at work. I only heard about it four hours later, after the SWAT team announced there was no bomb.
Mountain
I put my fingers in the stream, but I did not drink. Clear ice melt washing emerald-gold moss and pebbles in a hundred shades of earth.
The salmon don’t spawn here. But sun-yellow butterflies light on the banks with feathery feet, long tongues curling.
Flood
When the water went back to the river where it belonged, blonde shocks of hay hung from power lines like the dried up scalps of Norse giants. Guess we showed them.
Fire
“All lives matter,” they yelled. And by “they” I mean the people whose children weren’t murdered in cold blood by a standing army. Occupation Domestication. No Voice Without Retribution. No More Constitution.
Silent, it smolders.
Mountain
Granite shoulders like a Picasso portrait, Blue Period. Cloaked with snow, capped with a swoff of cloud, trees at her ankles a golden froth of maple sugar, and that silence— broken! Because groaning glaciers, calving into babbling streams, tumbling into gurgling rivers and crashing into roaring oceans and this whole shouting planet of grasshoppers chirping and elk lowing and coyotes yip-yip-yowling and the fishermen coaxing their mermaids into rainbow nets of desire, because the starlings singing to children in the city and the oaks in Fremont cracking open those sidewalks with their wide black roots bursting out of every confining concrete wall and spilling over to fill the empty spaces left behind—!
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Liz Kellebrew lives in Seattle and writes fiction, poetry, literary essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Coachella Review, Elohi Gadugi, The Conium Review, Mount Island, Section 8, The Pitkin Review, and Vine Leaves Literary Journal. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College.
Reading recommendation: Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine.