Flood Season
by A.L. Crisp
You smell the river wherever you go. Green. Brown. Pregnant with rot. There’s not a day that goes by where moss doesn’t curl itself indifferently around your bones.
It’s funny the way things work out. Funny the way they don’t.
A man died in the holler, the story goes. Or a woman. Or a baby. All of them, could have been. The point is, you can still hear the crying when you’re in the ravine. That’s what they say, anyway, but you walked the tracks through that stone crack a thousand times and didn’t hear nothing but the wind. Only thing that died out there was a raccoon or a possum or whatever it was that got squished on those big metal rails.
The train bridge was off limits. The bridge was too narrow to get out of the way in case of a passing train, and the water too shallow to jump because of the rocks. If you got stuck, you were a goner. Your mom caught your brother up there anyway, because he was fourteen and what else was there to do?
The water was rising, though, on account of it being April. Almost flooded, he’d argued. Plenty deep for an escape. They screamed at each other for literal hours while you packed. You think of your grandfather, long gone, of the old man up the road, and how he alerted everyone, every year. Water’s at the banks, we’ve got an hour.
Certain things are built to withstand the water. Necessity is nature’s true creator, or whatever Aesop said. Your mother is like that. Stout, small, dug in. Immovable. The river parts around her, like Moses, like a boulder. The water wears her in deep creases, but she never breaks.
The same cannot be said for you.
Your body is soft where it fractures. The river sends pieces of you crumbling on her shore like soaked plaster. Too much moisture is a poison. Everyone knows that. Once the mold really sets in, it’s almost impossible to get rid of.
Certain things are built to withstand the water, but not everything. Not you. Or maybe you, depending. The train still runs out over that bridge despite the floods. You still take great breaths, inhaling honeysuckle and woodrot over golden plains of swaying bluestem, every exhale containing spores.
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BIO
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​​Born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks, A.L. now lives in a little prairie bungalow with her wife Rebaccah and spends most of her time reading, writing, and wondering how, exactly, she ended up in Kansas.
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WHY I WRITE
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​It will sound horribly cliché to say this, but I write because I am absolutely sickeningly, disgustingly, achingly, saccharinely full of love. For everything. People, plants, animals, sticks, stones, and every single story that they tell. From a very young age I had this idea that writing was the only thing- and I mean the only thing- that I ever wanted to do. I write because I have to. Because there’s a kind of thing living inside of me that only understands how to process all of that love through writing, because if I don’t get it out of me it would eat me alive. I hope that everything you ever read feels like a love letter. Even when it doesn’t.​
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​SOCIAL MEDIA
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Bluesky: @alcrisp
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