“Lifeguard”
by
Diane Williams
We had tried we had tried my mother and I to get someone to help us stop the flood in the house. We had tried to get some man. So that when my father and the man who guards my father returned, but when they were not yet inside the house, I went out to them.
That man who guards my father was sizing me up like he was wild. His head was on its side in midair bouncing, his shoulder all dipped down because I was forcing him to leave me alone with my father, and I was forcing him to go into the house to deal with the flood and with my mother, so that I was the one left guarding my father, who was wearing those shoes, who was taking those small steps toward the house. I was saying to my father, “It’s not so bad, the flood. You’ll see,” and I was talking as slowly as he was walking in those shoes.
Those shoes on my father were the worst things I saw when I was getting him into the house, not getting him into the house, guarding him while he inched his way toward it.
Those shoes did not look like shoes that could hold a foot. There did not look to be room for a foot of flesh inside them, just a foot of bone, long like a pipe and they were forcing their way to the door of his house which was open, but from which we could not hear yet the rushing of water that I had felt rushing inside of the pipe—the hot rushing that I had seen blur the floor so that the floor was no longer a clear thing to see, so that the ceiling of our house was shedding through its lights the way rain comes down out from under a bright sun.
So that of course we were wet, my mother and I, with water binding like bracelets on our wrists, up and down our arms, like extra hair on our foreheads, on our clothes extra shapes, in our shoes which made my feet feel larger and heavier than they had ever felt.
At the door with my father, it was as if everything was hotter and wetter and louder in the house than I had remembered and was getting more so, just with us about ready to enter—and my mother and the man who guards my father must have been the cause. They had had so much time, I thought they had, and together they had not stopped it.
And then, before we ever entered, my father was telling me what we should do, even though I could not make it out, not the words, but I knew he was telling me how to stop the flood, if we wanted to.
Biblioklept 