8 Balls and the house on Dana Part 15

Kim slides herself through the opening in the door that the water has allowed her. 

The entire living room is a swirling tide pool created by the opening of the front door. Kim becomes as hysterical as I am as she wades into the house. 

Shaking a Marlboro Light from her pack, Kim grabs it and shoves it into the corner of her mouth. Her eyes are as big as saucers as she looks around and shakes her head. Kim’s face grows red as the tears appear just below the surface.

Everything on the floor that the water touched is now floating in a brown dirty muck. “The water came in through the window!” I yell and point into the kitchen. Kim looks at me with wide eyes and says “What the fuck?” Kim screams “Through the window!” I repeat, my hand still pointing towards the kitchen. “That’s Nuts!” Kim yells as she stomps through the water into the kitchen.

Standing in front of the window, Kim sucks on her cigarette like it is a medicine that will calm her down. “What the fuck?” Kim screams again. For the rest of the day everything that Kim finds in the apartment elicits her to scream “What the fuck?”

The good news is that the water has stopped pouring through the windows. The bad news is that everything we own is wet and/or ruined. It’s hours later, the sun has started to set and Kim and I am using everything we have to mop up this water and to get it out of the house. Every bath towel, every roll of paper towels and what used to be dry bedding gets used. Kim remains quiet but I can hear her sniffle and release an almost silent “sob” as she works.

The house phone is dead and now Kim and I take turns walking the two blocks to the gas station to use the pay phone. We have used up all the space on the landlords answering machine and now the line just rings and rings. To add insult to injury the pay phone keeps stealing any change we put into it.

There is no way that we can sleep and we work through the night hauling almost all of our belongings out to the curb for garbage pick-up. The clothes get thrown into a large green garbage bag and taken to the laundry mat. We take turns sleeping as the clothes spin first in the washer and then in the dryer. Kim’s eye makeup is running down her face and she uses the back of her hand to wipe the tears away. For some reason Kim doesn’t like to be seen crying not only in front of me but in front of anyone.

Kim is so exhausted, we had little between us to begin with and now the clothes from our backs are sopping wet and full of brown water. I look over at her and she has fallen asleep on the clothes piled on the folding table.

To be continued…

Geoffrey Doig-Marx holds all written and electronic rights to his writing "A Day in the Life". It can not be reprinted in part or whole without his written consent.