They don't name hurricanes anymore. Not name-names. There are too many of them now. No more Francines or Eltons or Irvings.

Dad said we'd leave Yemassee when it was underwater and not a second sooner. He said South Carolina was in our bones. I know it's just that we couldn't afford a move. No one will buy property this close to the coast anymore.  

Mom tried to waterproof our basement with some as-seen-on-tv liquid rubber. She sprayed it on the baseboards, turned them into long sticks of black licorice, then pronounced us safe. The first storm after she did this, the basement flooded anyway, so now every corner and seam and crack of the house, every window's edge, is covered in it. It's like we live in one of Desiree's drawings now, everything outlined with thick, black marker.

Desiree cries like crazy when the wind hits, but she's only eight. The way it whistles and moans she says it feels like it's the end of the world. Scooter huddles underneath the kitchen table because he knows it is. Dogs can sense that kinda stuff. We lose power every time, and the way the light sputters and cuts out makes my guts tangle up. The flashlights we use only seem to make the shadows sharper.

Outside, things crack and boom, rain batters the windows, and trees bow like sinners in prayer. Flood waters carry people and garbage and whole small structures miles down the road, mincing them in the churning blackness all the way. I know this because I can hear it and feel it: the sound like a bomb going off, the ground convulsing. I know it because I've seen the wreckage. Inside, we make shadow puppets and play liar's dice. We listen to the sound of branches and who-knows-what cracking against the side of the house like gunfire. We pretend we're sure that drywall and siding will keep us safe, that this moment, like every single one before it, will lead into another.

In the morning, Desiree collects fallen twigs and roof shingles with Dad. By the grace of God, he says, smiling, but I see the way his hands shake. Scooter runs the perimeter of the backyard, getting reacquainted because the landscape has changed. Mom takes the plywood boards down from the windows and it's like peeling off the eyelids of the house. It makes my skin crawl. She tucks them away for the next storm.

When it's safe enough, we walk around to see the damage. There's a pile-up of cars in the belly of the cul-de-sac, a bunch of crunched up metal skeletons all hunched together.  I recognize one of them as our neighbor's and I think of Mr. Calliope's calloused fingertips tapping impatiently on the steering wheel.

A sixty-year-old oak split the roof of a colonial just a few streets away, like someone took a baseball bat to a wet cardboard box. None of us are brave enough to check if the family was still inside. Desiree is too young for it to occur to her at all, at least I hope so. Downed power lines cover the pavement like worms flushed out by the rain, and there's not a stop sign or street sign in a three-mile radius still standing. When we get home, Dad and Mom and I stand vigil in the living room, clustered around the hand-crank radio listening to a woman count the dead. Desiree is sprawled on the floor in a pile of markers and crayons, scribbling technicolor landscapes.

I still name all the hurricanes. Not because it makes any kind of difference. I know it's only a matter of time before one of these storms kills us, buries us in bricks and branches and glass and plywood. In the darkness, I baptize each one. It's all I can do.

.

Virgina Eggerton has stories in or coming from Cease Cows, Moonpark Review and others. She's an MFA student at George Mason University.

Detail of oil painting on main page by Anthony J. Vaiksnoras: "Props" (1956).





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