Year of the Flood: Novel Read Free

lust, and greed.
Oh Creatures dear, that suffer here,
How may we Love restore?
We’ll Name you in our inner Hearts,
And call you Friend once more.
From The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

3
TOBY. PODOCARP DAY
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
    It’s daybreak. The break of day. Toby turns this word over: break, broke, broken. What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?
    She lifts her binoculars. The trees look as innocent as ever; yet she has the feeling that someone’s watching her — as if even the most inert stone or stump can sense her, and doesn’t wish her well.
    Isolation produces such effects. She’d trained for them during the God’s Gardeners Vigils and Retreats. The floating orange triangle, the talking crickets, the writhing columns of vegetation, the eyes in the leaves. Still, how to distinguish between such illusions and the real thing?
    The sun’s fully up now — smaller, hotter. Toby makes her way down from the rooftop, covers herself in her pink top-to-toe, sprays with SuperD for the bugs, and adjusts her broad pink sunhat. Then she unlocks the front door and goes out to tend the garden. This is where they used to grow the ladies’ organic salads for the Spa Café — their garnishes, their exotic spliced vegetables, their herbal teas. There’s overhead netting to thwart the birds, and a chain-link fence because of the green rabbits and the bobkittens and the rakunks that might wander in from the Park. These weren’t numerous before the Flood, but it’s astonishing how quickly they’ve been multiplying.
    She’s counting on this garden: her supplies in the storeroom are getting low. Over the years she’d stashed what she thought would be enough for an emergency like this, but she’d underestimated, and now she’s running out of soybits and soydines. Luckily, everything in the garden is doing well: the chickenpeas have begun to pod, the beananas are in flower, the polyberry bushes are covered with small brown nubbins of different shapes and sizes. She picks some spinach, flicks off the iridescent green beetles on it, steps on them. Then, feeling remorseful, she makes a thumbprint grave for them and says the words for the freeing of the soul and the asking of pardon. Even though no one’s watching her, it’s hard to break such ingrained habits.
    She relocates several slugs and snails and pulls out some weeds, leaving the purslane: she can steam that later. On the delicate carrot fronds she finds two bright-blue kudzu-moth caterpillars. Though developed as a biological control for invasive kudzu, they seem to prefer garden vegetables. In one of those jokey moves so common in the first years of gene-splicing, their designer gave them a baby face at the front end, with big eyes and a happy smile, which makes them remarkably difficult to kill. She pulls them off the carrots, their mandibles chewing ravenously beneath their cutie-pie masks, lifts the edge of the netting, and tosses them outside the fence. No doubt they’ll be back.
    On the way back to the building, she finds the tail of a dog beside the path — an Irish setter, it looks like — its long fur matted with burrs and twigs. A vulture’s dropped it there, most likely: they’re always dropping things. She tries not to think of the other things they dropped in the first weeks after the Flood. Fingers were the worst.
    Her own hands are getting thicker — stiff and brown, like roots. She’s been digging in the earth too much.

4
TOBY. SAINT BASHIR ALOUSE DAY
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
    She takes her baths in the early mornings, before the sun’s too hot. She keeps a number of pails and bowls up on the rooftop, for collecting the afternoon-storm rainwater: the Spa has its own well, but the solar system’s broken so the pumps are useless. She does her laundry on the rooftop too, spreading it out on the benches to dry. She uses the grey-water to flush her toilet.
    She rubs herself