Sometimes the floodwaters rose and the house got cut off from anything and Marion was all day at the top floor of the building feeling glum, dark, surrounded and waterlogged. Long hours (days) she would spend staring down at the water and the tops of the trees, while from time to time people were going by below on rafts and boats and rowboats and improvised boats as well as clinging to things that were not even boats and the whole time Marion was watching the things people did and listening what they said and sometimes using her notebook to write down types and kinds of detritus floating there in the muddy water – observing drowned bed sheets, shipwreck furniture, gargoyles of garbage rags and plastic containers. Sometimes when she got excited about what she noticed in this method, Marion would call to Tigar, yelling his name repeatedly and saying ‘come come, come on’ and mostly he would reluctantly get up from the mattress where he lay and resided most days to come look out the big window with her, the two of them looking down in the world of muddy water and marvelling in stereo, pointing at items that floated past and him urging her to get down quickly out of sight when the rescue boats came motoring by, with their electric and loudhailer voices and beacons and teams of men shrouded in aquatic all-black combat suits, because after all Marion and Tigar did not want to be rescued, not even a little bit, at least not like that.

In the nitetime it would get cold. And of course then you could hear new old things out in the night on the night water, for instance the sound of wailing and suchlike, and the cries of horror and terror and surprise and loneliness and sometimes a sad music, impossible to say where from, and you could anyway also see the lone eyes of the searchlights skimming the black water like the strange fish of a old deep sea Nature Channel. In the cold they (Marion and Tigar) would light up a fire on the big stone (paving stone) they had placed right close by the window, building it up all high and furious like the devil may care, so the flames could warm them and meanwhile lick against the brick walls and the window frame, they didn’t care. The big stone for the fire was already scorched and marked from all the fires they made on it before. Scratched and filthy ot was something they had carried up the stairs with a lot of mutual efforts, just after the previous flood or the previous previous flood, they could not remember, but at least they could keep warm was what they told themselves and besides they could stare in the flames and watch pictures forming in there.