Even after the water fell, the wind was constant. Its presence was not the same as the gusts that had brought down the power lines, tumbled the street signs, and broken the windows, but it was there in some form for long after the storm passed. After the streets were dry once more, it blew the garbage and the debris around in small twisters on the empty streets. It forced its way through shattered windows, shaking the glass that clung around the edges of the frame. It slid down the necks of the coats of those who were left there, huddling in the streets.

The wind blew and the lights stayed out. The wind blew and the subways refused to move. The wind blew as the gas stoves and heaters clicked and stopped. It blew at the backs of gang members that walked down streets they had claimed. It blew as politicians met in places far from the empty avenues to talk about what was to be done about them. It blew as crews scrambled to make things move, to make things snap and click and whirl, to make things whole again.

There were places the wind felt even colder than it did in the streets. Out near the ocean, near the decrepit boardwalk and the series of lean-tos that had been built near it by those with nowhere left to go, the wind stung. In the dark rooms that people would never return to, the wind howled. In the high-rise low-income houses where the old and disabled clung to their lives and their memories of a city that was now gone, the wind tore with teeth.

Part Four Makayla—December

PART FOUR

MAKAYLA—DECEMBER

1 After the boat, something broke. I felt like I’d been pushed sideways out of my own head, and was living somewhere else. My mind was a balloon tethered to the top of my skull, pulling behind me as the wind blew.

After raping me, he went back to the front of the boat, whistling, and steered to where I was going. He took me there anyway, as if he hadn’t just done what he’d done, as if nothing had happened. I curled up in the back of the boat, shaking. I was a fucking numptie, I thought, and it was all my fault.

In the stairwell of my grandmother’s building, there were no fluorescent lights blinking like they usually were. There was no light from my now-dead cell phone. I didn’t have a flashlight, so I stumbled up through the darkness. I didn’t know I was myself. I didn’t know what it was to be somewhere, where I ended and the darkness began. It was only when I tripped and stumbled, fell flat down on my hands and knees, and felt pain that I knew I still had a body.