Free The Hundred-Year Flood by Matthew Salesses

rained.
    “For someone with a fear of abandonment,” she said when he covered her with his body. Then she stopped, one heel catching against the cobblestone.
    “Is that what I have?” he asked, his heart pounding.
    In her bedroom he pressed his face between her breasts, breathing her in. He would not be his father, not drive people away and pretend he was the one who’d left. He didn’t have anything to deny or atone for. But he kept premeditating his kisses. Beside her ear, under her chin, in the hollow of her throat.
    She dug her nails into his back. “What are you staring at?”
    She had a girlish room, unembarrassed by stuffed animals. He realized he was looking for the ghost.
    “Fuck me,” she said, surprising him.
    He twisted awkwardly and slid off the bed. She sucked in a sharp breath. He bit his lips and felt for the pile of clothes with his foot in the darkened room. When she pulled the comforter over her head, he carried the pile into the bathroom.
    He lay in his bed that night cursing himself.
     
    The next day, Tee climbed over the railing in Vyšehrad and sat on the cliff above the Vltava. Sailboats struggled to tack against the wind. Back in the ruins, a little boy knelt in the prayer maze, eyes closed. When the boy left, Tee walked into the center. He found a tiny blue thimble, just big enough to catch a drop of rain.

III
    The tree was a magnificent sugar maple at least a century old. “It makes the garden come together,” Katka had said, meaning garden in the British sense. The maple reached up from the middle of the yard like a many-fingered hand beneath the green glove of leaves. It was weeks after Pavel’s attack. A neighbor had called Rockefeller for help in the middle of a party, and all the guests had gone down to Malešice together. Katka balanced on a branch twenty feet above the ground, in the tree because of her husband.
    Later she would tell Tee how Pavel had gotten the paintings out of the closet, somehow, and into the bedroom, how she had found him in the middle of them, as Tee had been months earlier. She had been cooking lunch. Pavel asked her to move his art into the kitchen. He often had strange requests for his work. She set the canvases in four rows, the painted sides to the wall, protected from the splattering gulaš. When she was done, he stood in front of her and kissed her.
    Out of nowhere he lodged one cast against her chest, already holding her back, and with the other cast, he tipped the largest painting into the stove. When it caught fire, he kicked the canvases out of the house and into the wet grass. He was lucky he hadn’t burned down the neighborhood.
    Beneath the tree, Tee didn’t know where to look: what was left of the paintings smoldered nearby; Katka’s white limbs shone through the leaves as she swayed in the sway of the wind; Pavel yelled below, stomping in a bathrobe; the other guests pulled bottles from pockets and predicted a storm; the neighbor stepped back, rubbing his cheeks; Rockefeller yanked his jacket off his wide shoulders and beat at the dying flames. Tee guessed a storm would only affect Katka’s grip. The art was beyond saving. The already damp ground had contained the blaze. The smoke itched in Tee’s eyes, and when he wiped them clear, there was a second glow at the base of the tree. For a moment he thought he had been wrong and the tree was about to light up. But then the glow became a foot, as if the tree had flipped upside down and was about to walk away. Tee wiped his hands on his shorts and stepped forward, and the foot disappeared. Tee reached for the lowest branch, putting the ghost out of his mind. He swung a knee over. Katka waited in the middle of the branches, one place Pavel’s casts could never reach her.
    “How did you get so high?” Tee called up to her. “Are you okay?” Sap stuck to his skin. One off-move might send both of them falling. Her eyes shone clearly, even from fifteen feet above. She had tan shorts on, and