Mom hugs me but doesn't know who I am. She thinks I'm a little girl looking out the window as mist rises off water flowing over the old beaver dam. I am the mist. I'm the shadow of a scrub tree leaning toward kids with a dog who fish in the canal, the whisper to a blind woman sewing on a Singer machine as she listens to news reports of a small plane crash over a field that is hidden by ponds. I'm the thing that makes the plane crash and cries in the field as it burns. An old man fishing off the causeway sees me in rising waters and starts to wonder why death is a little girl who walks the river. Later, Mom thinks I'm in the living room watching cartoons, but I'm in the dilapidated dorm room of a girl who is finding the courage to stick pins under her arms while recalling a drowned man fishing on the beach at sunrise. I'm what floats near the surface of the swollen river as a teenager bikes through the waters in search of the dead while holding a school-zone sign. I'm hiding in the ambulance near the man on the stretcher, the thing he sees as it stops his heart. Mom doesn't know about the gun in our neighbor's bedroom, the rope that hangs from the fan. A girl left homeless by the flood hears the sirens as first responders arrive on the scene of a motorcycle crash. Mom thinks I'm doing my homework. I'm not because of how the crash happened. Mom sees me at the kitchen table eating the sandwiches she prepared for my dinner during the flash-flood warning. She thinks I'm with her in the house eating. I'm moving through old Victorians downtown, flooding where children who play with tin cans are unaware of me looking out the window in the rain. Every window. Mom hears me singing and never knows the song is for the woman who survived the fire in the loft caused by powerlines downed in the flood three towns away. Twenty-four men and women died in that fire, feeling me in the smoke. Where they could no longer see, I was reaching to guide them.

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