Page 2 of Currents of Desire

I stare at the radio. Shapes?

We get drift walkers in the harbor sometimes, scavengers looking for fish guts or tourists stupid enough to toss them a sandwich. They’re nuisance animals, mostly. But Miller doesn’t sound like he’s looking at a drift walker. He sounds like he’s looking at something from the trench.

We aren’t supposed to see the deep ones. They stay down where the pressure crushes submarines. If they’re surfacing…

My hand twitches. A phantom sensation ripples through my right palm, the feeling of wet neoprene sliding against skin. It’s a tactile hallucination, vivid and sickening.

Don’t.

I squeeze my hand into a fist, tight enough to make the knuckles pop, trying to crush the memory before it takes root. I focus on the pain of my fingernails digging into my palm, but the radio chatter has opened the door, and the pressure headache is prying it wide open. The darkness of the boarded-up house helps the memory project itself against the back of my eyelids.

I’m not in my kitchen. The smell of ozone is gone, replaced by rot and diesel.

I’m waist-deep in brown, churning sludge. The roar of the floodwater is deafening, a physical weight pressing against my chest, squeezing the air out of my lungs. Rain is slashing my face, blinding me. It’s night, but the SES floodlights cut harsh cones through the deluge.

I have a hand in mine. Small. A kid’s hand.

I’m screaming at him to hold on, but I can’t hear my own voice over the water. I’m braced against a submerged fence post, my boots searching for traction in the mud that isn’t there anymore. The earth has dissolved. The current is a living thing, a monster made of silt and debris, and it wants him. It’s pulling at his legs, dragging him down.

I have him. I have him. I’m the strongest guy on the squad. I’m the one they send in when the ropes snap. I don’t lose things. I don’t fail.

Then the log hits me.

It slams into my shoulder, dead-weight timber moving at thirty knots. The pain is blinding, a white-hot spike that shatters my focus. My structural integrity fails. My grip falters. Just for a microsecond. Just a heartbeat of weakness.

The wet neoprene of the kid’s glove slips.

It’s slow. It happens so slowly. I lunge, my fingers scraping against his wrist, then his fingertips. I feel the fabric, then the cold skin, and then… nothing.

Just water. Just the brown, hungry water swirling where a boy used to be.

Flash.

I gasp, sucking in a lungful of hot, stagnant air. I’m back in the kitchen. My heart is hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, frantic and irregular. My hand is shaking so hard the knuckles are white.

“Christ,” I mutter, rubbing my face. My beard scratches my palm, grounding me. “Christ, Jack. Get it together.”

I reach for the whiskey, not bothering with a glass. I unscrew the cap and take a long pull, letting the cheap burn cauterize the memory. It doesn’t fix it, nothing fixes it, but it dulls the edges. It puts a layer of fog between the water and me.

That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m alone at the edge of the world. Because the water takes things, and it took that kid. It eventually took my marriage. Sarah couldn’t live with a ghost, and that’s what I became. It took the version of me that thought he could save people.

Now, I only save myself. And barely that.

A low moan starts outside. It sounds like a cello being bowed by a rusty saw, vibrating through the wall studs.

The wind arrives all at once. The first gust slams the house so hard the timber frame groans on its stilts, shaking dust from the ceiling.

A second later, the rain hits. It sounds like shrapnel tearing into the corrugated iron roof—a solid, physical wall of noise that vibrates in my jaw and completely drowns out the radio.

I grab the whiskey and back into the hallway. The kitchen is too exposed, and I need to be in the center of the house.

The house is shuddering now, a constant, rhythmic trembling. The stilts flex beneath the floorboards. Engineering says they’ll hold, but the wind says otherwise. The wind says it wants to tear this place apart, splinter by splinter.

I sit on the floor, back against the linen closet, bottle between my knees. I close my eyes and listen to the violence.

The roar is continuous, a white-noise scream of nature tearing itself apart. I can hear branches snapping outside, the thwack-thwack-thwack of palm fronds beating against the siding like whips. Something heavy hits the roof, a coconut, maybe a branch, and rolls down the corrugated iron with a metallic clatter.

I take another drink. The whiskey sits warm in my stomach, fighting the cold knot of anxiety. I check my watch—8:00 p.m. The eye is hours away. This is just the warm-up.