They’ll be driven out into the open if the waters keep rising. Something drains out of me as I sit fixed in place watching.

The water goes higher. The streets are a grey slough.

Higher, higher—seething ashenness rushing in the doors. It climbs toward the windows.

Now I see them, dark spots emerging from the town, feet drag and slip and fall in the flow and now the careful enemy aims fires aiming and firing—some of those struggling shapes stop, weave, some fall; they are making for the mounds of displaced earth by the mine. Figures shapes move on the rooftops—with sick impotence I see them picked off, my eyes darting around and finding nothing, nothing, I can’t shout or fling a stone to jog their aiming arms. The breathing grip on me is driving its cold into my body harder and harder and I can only sit, my fingers crimping my knees—bodies of my friends bob and spin, rushing along fast enough now—or they fall wounded and struggling, and drown—and the horror of this thought is enough to wrench me an inch forward on my seat.

Above me I hear a studiously adjusted clench on the canvas. That breathing makes the canvas sputter as it rakes it with its grip—I will make that thing move drive it off strike it—I’ve seen mountain snow and I call that snow to mind as I drop my eyes to the fist-sized flat stone that weighs down one corner of the tent flap near my right foot—tears burst like acid from my eyes.

Still, white-clotted pelts of shaggy evergreens on the far side of a field of blue snow.

And then night, the flakes spin bright past my face and vanish in the gloom, fluffed and weightless in filmy air and a cold that polishes me.

My fingers have opened and my hand slides heavy as a millstone from my leg my arm drops to my side nearly numb.

Lighter than feathers, the snow flakes dance to the ground, weaving and looping with no breeze, no palpable influence, with only their own native frivolity. My hand stretches toward the stone with a feeling like the grating of rust on rust in my elbow in my shoulder. I am pulling madly against my lower back that is rigid as if I wore a corset, but I say I. am. in. the. snow. which scatters in high plumes with one half-hearted kick of my foot, which wafts back up from the ground like it’s not done playing.

The rock presses my palm and my fingers snap shut around it I swing straightening my legs and strike at the puckered canvas. The tent roof plunges violently, a hoarse indrawn moan erupts, breaking the breathing and that yawning roar takes its place again. The blow felt weak, useless. But perhaps it wasn’t.