It was passed around and passed down, handed around like an object. It was discussed in public and in private, in the post office and in the corner store, very close to the aisle with the Hot Fries. By this time the sand was gone, even its fake iteration, and the water was coming close.

Our children remembered the rumor even when they were no longer children. When they had our bodies burned and put into a single urn, or when they threw away all of our things and sold the car and all of the furniture (except for the mahogany china cabinet), they knew it. When they had to move inland, landlocked, they knew it. When the children had to get rid of even the last few possessions, when they walked down the street with the old mahogany china cabinet, the rumor followed them.1 The children’s teeth were naturally straight; no braces had been needed.

The earth folding in on itself, the water levels swelling irrevocably, and some form of the rumor persisting. Oh, how words persist! What the children’s children felt in their bodies, in their left knee: a hurricane. We had left them nothing. Or with pollution there was nothing worth having. They had nothing except a knowledgeable precipitation—the hail breaking up the roof, and all the cracks in the building’s foundation, in the earth’s foundation, forest fires. In the eroded purple painting, in the trembling purple painting, the seismic waves persisted with an elastic and bouncing omniscience.

The children, the children’s children’s children, in their empty apartments, with their mouths and nostrils covered, with their oxygen tanks and the lack of materialism that surrounded them. There was nothing left to be said, there were no words to harm, but their bodies were prepared for words.

The children, the children’s children’s children no longer had to fear: the rumor was in their dry skin, in their hangnails, and in their low blood pressure.

Where there might have been a bookcase, the children’s children’s children stretched their bodies, they pulled their feet up behind them, their heels on their buttocks. Next to the space for the hat boxes the children’s children’s children’s heads moved from one side to the other, and around the space for a deep freezer the children’s children’s children lunged. Their elbows held olecranon fractures and around the empty floors they lay themselves down. In their hazmat suits their chests touched their thighs and their toes gathered under, with their backs straight or rounded, the fingers of each hand almost touching, or touching the urn that held us, and held all the burned things, and because they were otherwise empty of heirlooms the earth cracked around them, and their knees were bent in pliés, grande pliés.