I tried to think about what my grandmother saw, what made her smirk, and when I started to feel down about it, that I didn’t know and couldn’t figure it out, I didn’t want to remember it anymore, so I took two more pins, settled into that fallen tree, and I thought I was sleeping until the rain hit my open eyes, the only part of me awake, and I didn’t shut them. Floods. If it keeps raining this whole place will flood. All of it. If I stay here long enough the water might rise up, brush my feet, recede, come back higher, to my knees, recede, come back higher, higher, to my neck, gone again, higher, higher, higher, over my head, and it will go back the way it came but not empty-handed: it’ll have me with it, right out there in the water too murky to see through at first but it’ll keep filling with that rainwater, diluting the pollution, until it’s crystal clear. But it’ll be too late for me to see—I won’t be breathing.

“Fuck,” I said. I burned a hole through my jacket, right down to my arm, and melted my skin like plastic to a flame. I smacked at the red embers of that dropped cigarette, and then I shut my eyes and felt the rain stop.

. . .

I was shivering when I woke up in the morning, which I knew was morning by the way the horizon was over the river, how the light rose soft like blood from a scratch. I cleared my throat and tried to stand but fell back from the weight of my heavy clothes. I tried again and was up. On both feet. Barely. Two, three steps—I got it, but I sit back down, give myself more time. I check my pockets for that bottle of pins, but I can’t find it. You be good, I hear her say. You be good. You be good. You be good. Her voice is everywhere but nowhere.

I was supposed to call her. Fuck. I said I would. The sun has come up now, and I got up and walked the path, going only where it was taking me, to the road, the road home.

But no one was there: Mom’s car was gone, the lights all out in the house but lit up bright from the sun shining through the windows.

I picked up the phone but couldn’t remember the number to Woodlands, so I had to look it up in the phone book. I found it and dialed and a woman answered, and I asked her to connect me to my grandmother’s room. She asked if I was family, and I told her I was her grandson.

“Hold on,” she said. “I’m transferring you.”

Static. A low beep, beep, beep. Crackle of answering.

“Who is this?” the voice said.