The rains make it impossible to drive home. She has to leave her car in the Walgreens parking lot and wade the rest of the way to her apartment. Later she hears that someone was washed away when they got out of their car. Once back she has to guide her boyfriend home over the phone, helping him avoid the flooded streets, toggling between Google Maps and the Weather Channel. “The situation is highly fluid,” she laughs, and he laughs. She tells him to turn and he is facing a river that doesn’t belong.  He thinks he sees something big and white bobbing in the water. What, a body? She laughs. 

What—

Then his phone dies. There are flares at the top of the street that make the water red. The white thing floats by again. Now it seems snagged on something and is bouncing against the current, like a little flailing man. There are no other cars and it is very dark except for the flares. He has to turn around. The thunk of the wipers, the rattle on the roof. He isn’t afraid. There is mounting fear. Mounting dread. If the water keeps rising at this rate. Rising over the hill. Mounting the hill. He peers out at the white thing again. He backs up for higher ground. His lights go green into the water. The white thing is bobbing out there.  Judging from the almost covered stop sign the water must be eight feet, not so bad, really bad. Rising fast. Moving fast. What if the white thing were his girlfriend, his mother or father. Someone’s something. Or, boom, one of those it tolls for thee deals and the person that is washed away is him and you’re hearing the story from a ghost thing. Or maybe it’s not who it is but what it is: maybe a garbage bag, then a white garbage bag of ransom money for the kidnapped kid in the trunk of the abandoned car over there. Go to the car, or go to the bag for confirmation that the kid’s in the trunk of the car? Or a white duffel bag of payroll off a Brink’s truck, with the robbers ironically drowned in the truck. Then the bitter irony of wading in to save or retrieve what turns out to be a white laundry bag from the hospital nearby, maybe the one where his recovered white body is being worked over by desperate paramedics, but the bitter irony part because the laundry bag is stuffed with sheets, like the ones his students had once described to him, filthy with blood, shit, vomit, or apocryphal secret abortions, or organ thefts gone wrong. He opens the car door to try and see better and freezing water sloshes over his feet. Ankles. His car goes dead and the lights are out. Feels like he’s already in, so he jumps. The flares are out too and the water is black. He can see the white thing ahead. It takes off in the current, but now he can see it’s way too small to be anything worth anything at all.

The water from the next street banked over the hills behind the dark houses and came crashing down, moving so fast his story could not keep up with the waves.

***

The teacher, Ash, says, “Here I am with the effects team for a movie you will probably never see called Suction.” The class PowerPoint for “Achieving Realism with Miniatures and Water” displays a photo of Ash, a little younger in chopped-short hair and baggy jeans, working with a trio of young men around a twenty-foot-high model of the Lincoln Memorial interior, with Lincoln in the chair. The next photo is a detail of tiny scale figures in dark suits and yellow and red ties, cowering on Abe’s lap. Ash’s looming hand cradles one of the miniatures, like a curious fairy tale giant studying a captured human. “The script called for a tsunami to hit Washington D.C., stranding the President and his cabinet and washing them away.” There is a ripple of laughter and someone asks, “Which President?” Ash’s droll purr, “This was 2019,” earns raucous applause. 

From her usual seat in the back, Kendal mimics Ash’s cool smile and tilted head, whispering “This was 2019” in secret impersonation, though her large body could hold two of Ash. “Gamine,” Ash had said of herself. “It’s an advantage when you have to fit into a monster suit.” The next photo is an area shot showing a steep chute leading up to a tank that will release hundreds of gallons of water onto the monument. “The water has a mix of non-foaming soap to break down surface tension, to make it act ‘looser’ and smaller. It is the central problem with water models; you can’t miniaturize wet, but a big set helps. And that soap. And some high-pressure blowers around the base here, so when the water hits it crashes and sprays like a real wall of force.” 

As she has for the past two sessions of the class, Kendal makes a show of taking notes, but her real study is Ash’s face, body, and voice. She has given up trying to name what Ash makes her feel. At the end of the class she always slips away through the back door. 

When the next and final class is over, the back door is locked, and she has to pass by Ash to leave. She freezes when Ash says her name. The other students have left. Ash says, “I’m sorry we’ve never talked. You’ve been here for two sessions and have never said a word. Are you a filmmaker?”

Kendal is trembling. “I’m a beautician. No, not really. I just cut hair.”

Ash nods and smiles. 

“I went to the office to sign up for your class again but they didn’t have the dates.”

“I’m so sorry, Kendal. I won’t be coming back. I guess the community college heard about the thing last class. Washing away the president. They said injecting politics into a film special effects class was inappropriate.”

“They can’t do that! That’s unacceptable! I’ll start a, what do you call it, a petition! This can’t…!”

Ash’s cool touch scorches. 

“It’s all right, Kendal. I have to go back to California anyway. I’ve been running away from some things. From someone. Really. It’s time. But I appreciate the feeling. I hope you keep up your interest in film.”

“I want to cut your hair.”

“What?”

Gregg Williard is a writer, artist and teacher based in Madison, Wisconsin. He studied painting at the New York Studio School and English at SUNY/Empire State College. His work can be found in The Rupture, Wrath Bearing Tree, Conjunctions, New England Review, The Iowa Review, Always Crashing and elsewhere. He teaches ESL to refugees at the non-profit Literacy Network, and does a late-night book reading hour on non-commercial WORT, 89.9FM.