Free After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry Page B

sacks for weeks so they were never delivered, and were dislodged when the water came. For a long time after, he said anyone passing by would have seen white envelopes floating on the black water.
    ‘About a week ago the water got just low enough to see the post office sign. When we get there, tell me if you can see it.’
    I asked him about the valve tower, and who came there. We’d drawn near it by then, and its yellow light gave him a hard translucent look as if he were made of amber. The tower was smaller than it had looked from the window, with red bricks neatly set in a checkered pattern, and a crenellated roof. The door was sheet metal, secured with rivets and heavily padlocked, but I could see through a grimy window to a mechanism studded with dials, and a computer with a dusty screen. A laminated sheet of paper stained with damp had been taped to the door. It said NO ENTRY.
    ‘It’s supposed to regulate the flow of water from the dam,’ he told me. ‘They come once or twice a year, maybe more. I never see them.’ Then his arm through mine tensed suddenly. He lowered his voice to a whisper, although there was no-one near who might have heard. ‘I tried to call them. I did. There’s a number on the door. Yesterday I called and the day before, and twice this morning before anyone was up, but they won’t listen. They said they’d send someone this month, maybe next, but it might be too late by then – the summer’s ending and there’ll be rain for days.’ We’d reached the place where the parched lawn gave way to gravel and rough grass, and banks of bramble with berries dying unripe between the leaves. The brambles had put out low branches that crept across the ground and caught our ankles as we passed.
    We came to the cannonball Eve told me had been brought down from the attic – it must have been found on a tideline somewhere, and was crusted with barnacles and rust. Alex bent to pick it up, holding it out to me cupped between his hands, laughing and hefting it from side to side as though he wanted me to see how strong he was. He carried it a few feet, pretending to toss it in the air like a tennis ball, but I could see how the weight of it raised ridges of muscle and tendon in his arm, and when he dropped it I thought I’d hear it ring like a ship’s bell on the hard earth. I looked at Alex, who’d stopped suddenly when he dropped the cannonball, and was staring fixedly at the embankment. It was only ten or fifteen feet high, on a sharp slope he could’ve dashed up without losing his breath or footing, but he looked for a moment old and defeated. He started plucking feverishly at the skin on his bottom lip, leaving a smear of blood. I walked past him and said loudly, ‘I’ll beat you to the top.’ It was childish of me, but it worked – he laughed and overtook me, and I reached the crest of the embankment a moment after him.
    We stood together on the high grass verge, the valve tower throwing its light on the dwindling reservoir. The waterline must once have been almost level with the grass embankment, but had receded in the drought and left a kind of rough beach littered with feathers and algae. All around us the dark pines of the forest stooped towards the water as if they were thirsty. I’d grown so used to parched lawns and dying flower beds that the few spikes of purple foxglove growing near the water’s edge seemed strange and rare, and I looked down at my feet afraid I might trample them into the ground. Alex swept out a hand to take in the reservoir from where we stood to the dam wall in the distance. ‘What do you think?’
    It was smaller than I’d thought, and darker. The surface of the water was black and opaque, and the reflection of the moon at our feet looked very small. He beckoned me nearer the edge, asking if I could see the post office sign, and I stepped forward until I was almost on the rubble beach. The pupils of my eyes opened to the dark until I could make out, just