Joshua Jones Lofflin
1. THE DISPATCHWe Have to Go Higher
Sydney: gone. Johannesburg, Miami. Obviously Venice and Amsterdam. Shanghai and Lagos and New York. Los Angeles. All within days of one another, some within hours. The satellite imagery plays over and over, the ice sheet tearing free, the waves visible from space. Around you, other stranded passengers quietly sob or stare ahead blank-faced or jab at their phones with trembling fingers even though half the country’s cell towers are down. Your own phone is dying, growing dimmer, and still you read and reread my final text. Another glacier collapses. Outside Baghdad, an oil tanker capsizes, chokes the city in billowing smoke. The Mississippi cracks open, breaks the U.S. in half. Next goes Chicago. Montreal. The airport shifts to backup generators, and the TVs blasting CNN go dark, cutting off a scientist as he says it will stop, has to stop. Then comes the rain.
Already the terminal’s flooding, the water smelling of ash, of oil, of sewage. You step through darkened corridors with my old Dodgers t-shirt wrapped around your mouth. Travelers who still have battery life hold their phones aloft, shining a light toward an emergency exit. Then you’re outside, pushed north by the throng of bodies, toward the highway. Abandoned trucks clog the overpasses. Beyond the jersey walls, the city is cloaked in rain. The crowd presses forward, crosses the Chattahoochee, swollen and red as blood. Overturned cars float in its current like drowned beetles followed by the bobbing corpses of cattle, pigs, and worse.
Somebody hands you a crying baby. You nestle her against your throat and hum a song, a tune you remember from when you and I watched the Rose Parade together, my niece on my shoulders and clapping along to the beating drums. You hum and march. Everyone is marching, feet slapping the wet pavement toward higher ground.
You warm yourself and the child in the remains of a Walmart, its shelves empty of anything useful. An old woman offers to hold the baby, her nostrils red and swollen, hair matted against her scalp. Does she look like you? She must look like you. The baby cries against your collarbone until you sing her asleep.
You lose your shoes. A man sprawled on the interstate watches you limp. He’s broken, you think. Broken down. He nods to your feet, says Go on, and you do. The shoes are too big and wet. When you look back, he’s lying with his eyes closed, catching rain in his mouth.
In Dalton, a woman stabs a man and nobody asks why. She drags herself beside you, keeps looking at your baby through sideling eyes, asks what its name is. She’s mine, you tell her, You can’t have her.
In a Costco outside Chattanooga, you eat dog. The rain falls harder. Word ripples among the walkers that Atlanta is gone.
A mud-spackled preacher claims there’s an ark for the righteous in the mountains. He touches the heads of the stumbling crowd, lays his hand on yours, on your baby’s, says God’s light, God’s light.
You stop sleeping. Days go from gray to black to gray again. There is only wet and ache and hunger and more wet. Torrents carve mud-slicked channels beside the highway. Black dorsal fins cut through the gray-brown water.
Higher, we have to go higher, you tell me. You talk to me more and more now, tell me about our child, whisper the names you’ve given her. Not the names we wanted to use, but new names, perfect names.
The roads give way, turn to gravel, to red, red earth that sucks at your feet. You lose your shoes again, don’t look for them. You take others’ hands as you climb, careful to cradle the baby’s head. She no longer cries but watches water pouring through a gorge with flint-blue eyes, watches the mud-spackled preacher float past, a shovel-sized gash across his head.
You use your free hand to pull yourself higher, through tangled knots of rhododendron, thickets of beech and mountain ash. Deer scramble alongside you, their legs streaked in clay or blood. Behind them, bobcats, coyotes, a small black bear. Their flanks close enough to touch, to bury your fingers within their rain-soaked pelts. You whisper their names to our baby: raccoon, squirrel, red fox. You tell her about all the animals she’ll see when she grows up. She bumps against your chest, eyes closed and listening.
The forest thins. Below, lakes spread like a blanket where once there were valleys. Sometimes a treetop rises from the water and birds fight over its vanishing perches. Beside them, long sinuous necks of forgotten creatures surface and dive. You hear them calling at night. When you try to answer, your throat is swollen, your voice a harsh rasp.
It’s light again, the rising water is almost upon you, and the baby is gone. You shuffle through the remaining crowd, tug at their empty arms, dig through the wet leaves, the mud-choked soil. The water is already knee-deep when the woman who stabbed a man pulls you upward, says you have to go higher, and she’s so strong, and you’re so light, and you agree, we have to go higher, you tell me this, tell me this is what we have to do, and you climb until there are no more trees. We have to go higher, you say again, louder now, but there is nowhere to go. And you sit with the others on the mountain crest, on a wet shelf of granite that rose from the seas millennia ago. At times the rain seems to lighten, revealing other mountaintop islands. Then, one by one, the mists close about them and they, too, disappear.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYMy laptop
Iced coffee
Cat
Books, always (most recently, some Angela Carter)
A nearby speaker playing music (never with lyrics while in writing-mode)
Cat
A bit of greenery
Sometimes a third cat
3. BIOGRAPHYJoshua Jones Lofflin’s writing has appeared in The Best Microfiction, The Best Small Fictions, The Cincinnati Review, CRAFT, Fractured Lit, SmokeLong Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Maryland. Find him on Twitter @jjlofflin or visit his website: jjlofflin.com.