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thedragonagelesbian · 1 year

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A Lesson in Drowning with Prophet Delilah Dubois

Adelaide first saw the headlights. The rain scattered their light, diffusing the fluorescent brightness into a hazy glare that consumed the whole world. She was standing square in the middle of the road, but she did not wince as the car beared down on her. She was too busy wondering what it would be like for it to consume her too. Would she also disappear into the white noise? Or would it be more like a classical devouring, replete with metal tongue and a cavernous chrome stomach?

She stood her ground.

Then, the jeep swerved. It missed her by inches, sent a shower of muddy water up her stockings, and rattled to a stop some yards away.

Adelaide’s next instinct was to run. She could sprint between the well-manicured lawns to her right or scale the nearest fence to her left and take her chances with Warwick Lord’s German shepherd howling something pathetic in his yard. But she had barely taken one step toward her escape when the driver’s door swung open. A tall, slender figure stepped out, features obscured in the storm.

Still, she knew who it was.

“Adelaide Lenora Dellouise, just what do you think you’re doing out here?”

The full name did make her flinch, but Adelaide squared her shoulders and set her jaw, trying to hold herself taut enough that she couldn’t shiver.

“Walkin!”

As he came around the back of the car, Adelaide caught a glimpse of her father’s dour expression in the red sheen of the tail lights, all furrows from his sandy hairline to the bridge of his nose.

“In the middle of a shelter-in-place advisory? Without so much as a raincoat on?”

For all his exasperation, Wyatt Dellouise didn’t have to strain to be heard over the sound of the raging storm. Then again, he had his deacon voice on. This wasn’t the soft muttering of a man who seemed perpetually ashamed to be alive for risk of deriving some pleasure from the whole ordeal, but rather the preacher’s booming, fit for a pulpit and louder than thunder.

Adelaide responded with a shrug. As much as she tried to hide it, though, she couldn’t ignore how cold and damp she was now that she had stopped moving. The wind ripped through the thin, soaked fabric of her sundress, and she had so much water in her shoes her toes squelched with every slight shift of her body. A moment later, her teeth began to chatter, and they wouldn’t stop knocking against each other no matter how hard she pressed her lips together.

Her father folded his arms and moved between her and the trunk of the car. Shadow eclipsed his face again, and all Adelaide could make out through the sheets of rain was his hazy red silhouette.

“Are you fixing to get pneumonia?”

“I was thinking I’d let the storm wash me out to sea, actually!”

The silence that followed delighted Adelaide so much she almost didn’t care how true her words were or how deep they hurt her. She’d swallow a knife and let it rend her from the inside out if it meant he knew it was his fault she was bleeding.

“Quit this foolishness,” her father said at last, sighing like a tempest gale. “Just come with me, Addie, please. We’ll go shelter together in the church.”

“Just drop me off at home!”

“Get in the car!”

And that was that, as Adelaide knew it would be since the moment the jeep rolled up, an outcome equal measures inevitable and terrifying. Who, after all, could ignore a direct order from Deacon Wyatt Dellouise? The voice of the First Church of Her Will spoke. You listened. That was the way the world worked, as immutable as any law of physics. Adelaide couldn’t fight that, no matter how hard she had tried over the last two years. For as many days as she had spent steeling herself against her father’s influence, in that instant she withered under his ironclad certainty like she was still seven years old and arguing about her bedtime. She could not help but be compelled.

She took a few teetering steps toward the jeep as an arc of lightning split the sky above them. In the crack of white, she saw her father’s face soften.

“Thank you, Addie.”

She shivered, tucked in on herself, and said nothing.

The worst part was that it actually was nicer in the car. Her father had already turned up the heat all the way, opened the passenger-side vents, and switched on the seat warmer. She didn’t want it to feel good. She wanted to resent it like she resented everything her father touched, but her body obviously hadn’t gotten the message. Feeling returned to her slowly, nipping at her numb extremities and stiff joints and hunched, frozen spine.

“Weeeeeell, Lady Dellouise… So kind of you to join us.”

Adelaide bolted upright as a low, smooth voice from the backseat interrupted her involuntary relaxation. She whipped around, damn near relishing her skittering pulse and tight lungs because it meant her defenses were still up, but there was no monster behind her. Just a man. Slimy John, as he was colloquially known, was certainly one of Harborview’s more disquieting citizens, with a penchant for selling knives to children. But he was still just a man, and he gave her a toothy, human smile.

“Johnathon and some other residents will be sheltering in the church with us.” Her father had climbed back into the car. There was a megaphone in the driver’s seat which he rested in his lap as he closed the door, dampening the storm. “Folks who’d be safer there than anywhere else, you understand. The Davises are cooking up dinner for everyone, and the Owens have lent us some camping equipment to help stay comfortable while we wait this thing out.”

“I am much obliged, Deacon Wy,” commented Slimy John. “Y’all really don’t have to go to so much trouble.”

“We’re a community. We take care of each other.”

Adelaide scoffed under her breath. She knew exactly where this so-called community’s care ran out, and it was at crossing her father.

They drove straight back to the church. As they trundled through Old Harborview, her father rolled down the window to blare his pronouncements about the shelter-in-place advisory and the church’s open doors, but he didn’t slow down to accept any other transients. Adelaide could only assume the new haste was for her benefit. The sooner she was locked inside, the better, right?

Adelaide dug her nails into her skin, glanced at her phone, and started counting the minutes til the storm’s passing, just like she and her best friend Nat used to do during Sunday School. Whoever could go the longest without checking the time got the other’s oreos during snack break.

She always lost.

Lit beneath by a pair of austere spotlights, the First Church of Her Will surged from the darkness, its single spire towering and curved like a giant rib jutting out into the night sky, a carcass picked clean. As the car pulled up, the wind’s rabid howling grew louder, screaming against the windows. Adelaide, who could finally wiggle her toes again, couldn’t decide which would be worse: braving the storm once more or facing whatever was waiting for her in the cathedral.

“I’ll get the umbrella out of the trunk,” her father announced. “No need for you to get any wetter than you already are.”

He turned off the engine. The car plummeted into darkness, and when the heat cut out, Adelaide shuddered, an ugly, reflexive twitch.

She snapped, “I’m fine,” and reached for the car door.

Before she could open it, however, Slimy John let out a long, low whistle of a laugh.

“Whew! She really got Melanie’s quick temper, don’t she, Wy?”

Adelaide and Wyatt both went rigid.

For her part, Adelaide was rarely ever equipped to talk about her mother, fifteen years gone and mourned more in the last two than at any other point in her life. On that particular day, when she was already hanging on by a thread, just the name was enough to send her trembling.

Worse than the name, though, was her father, who mirrored her tension in the corner of her eye. The symmetry between them, clamped tight around the same loss, made Adelaide sick to her stomach. Suddenly, she needed to get out of the car as fast as possible. Even the church had to be better than sitting in that moment of connection.

She threw herself out into the storm. It swallowed her up for a moment, but she ran up the slick steps and through the heavy double doors, and in an instant, the hurricane disappeared. In its place, the First Church of Her Will opened up before her for the first time in a year.

And in that instant, Adelaide knew she had made a mistake: this was worse.

Like her dad’s car, like the mansion down the road, like just about every inch of Harborview, it felt so much like it should’ve been home that she nearly burst. The memories slammed into her, cresting and crashing from every corner of the nave: the worn pews where she and Nat used to play hide-and-seek, the glinting prayer candles where she had knelt after her mother’s funeral, the lectern where her father had stood for so many days of so many years still larger than life, the painting behind the altar rendering the church’s founder, Our Lady Prophet Delilah Dubois, in severe beauty, each stroke of her countenance exactly as Adelaide remembered it after spending one too many sermons lost in her oil-slick eyes, each detail another mouthful of saltwater she couldn’t swallow.

And mercy, it was warm like the undertow wrapped around her throat

And it was full. The smiling faces of familiar strangers dotted her horizon, all brought together under the banner of community care and that stubborn, unerring streak of self-sufficiency that defined Harborview, and Adelaide hated it so much she could’ve choked on it.

The storm surge of her rage broke through its levee, and she was too full too sudden and sputtering for air as her vision blurred white-hot. Her mind churned, dizzy and desperate, around one furious thought: how dare?

How dare this no longer be her home? How dare he spoil that too?

And how dare they abide it? Her so-called family friends, the congregation that had raised her and now sat by twiddling their thumbs while her father drowned her?

“Adelaide!”

In one moment, the entire world was tilting around her, as if she were a liferaft thrown out to the roiling sea.

In the next, there was a hand on her shoulder. Her focus broke, and everything went still and straight again.

Nat’s father, Duke Owens, beamed down at her and tugged her inside.

“So good to see you, kiddo. How long’s it been?”

Adelaide blinked and stumbled after him. Sluggishly, the social scripts of polite society and normal conversation came back to her.

“Too long…”

“Well, it’s great you’re here. Sarah Davis is making her famous collard greens, and her, uh, third… the current husband brought over a huge batch of potato salad, and we’ve just put on a pot to cook some corn. We’ve also got water, juice boxes, even a lick of bourbon if you think you can get away with it.” He winked as he directed her down the aisle.

A shake clearer-headed, Adelaide got a better sense of who else was milling around in the shrine to her poisoned youth. About two dozen of Harborview’s fine citizens sprawled out across the pews. They were split half and half between those who were dispensing the charity and those who were receiving it. Among the latter, Adelaide identified a smattering of residents from the trailer park at the west edge of town, a stoned vanlifer, a young city couple whose car had probably broken down, a handful of farmers who didn’t trust the structural integrity of their houses, and Madame Tilly, the congregation’s oldest and most devout member.

The other half—composed of Mary Owens, her two sons, Sarah Davis, her daughter, her current husband, one of her ex-husbands, and another priest—clustered at the front of the nave. That, Adelaide knew, was her destination: the insufferable snare of small town small talk with people she had known all her life and resented.

The altar and the lectern had been pushed back to make room for a pair of mismatched folding tables. One held the Owens’ camping stoves and large, bubbling stock pots, while the other was attended to by the younger generation, who were setting out plates, bowls, silverware, and napkins. Combined with the drink coolers and the warming tupperwares of potato salad, the spread could have been any church potluck or community barbecue.

Indeed, the only indication of the hurricane was Adelaide herself, tottering to a stop in front of them and once again failing not to shiver.

The fussing began immediately.

“Oh, sweetheart, what happened to you?” cooed Mary Owens.

“Poor thing, you gotta go change!” exclaimed Sarah Davis. “I’ve got some spare stuff in my duffle…”

“Dang, Adelaide, you’re gonna get sick going out dressed like that,” tutted Nat’s older brother, Jack.

“That’s what I told her.” Adelaide felt her father’s hand on her shoulder like a vice. “I found Addie halfway back home. She got caught out in the storm when the advisory went into effect, but, mercy be, we’re all safe here now.”

The others, ever the faithful parishioners, nodded and intoned, “Mercy be.”

Smothering the urge to gag, Adelaide cleared her throat and mustered up her most charming cheerleader smile.

“Mrs. Davis, that change of clothes sounds swell just about now.”

The church’s holiness had never quite extended into the single-occupant bathrooms in the basement. The consecration stopped short at the harsh fluorescents, speckled linoleum tiles, grimy ceramic, and the half-empty trash can perched on its throne of wet, crumpled paper towels. The closest thing to sanctity in the room was the pastel cross-stitch wall art reminding its viewers that Delilah preached moderation in all things… except cleanliness!, and even that couldn’t compel anyone to actually throw their paper towels away.

It was as close to an escape as Adelaide was going to get.

She had to peel her sopping clothes away from her skin, like wearing away the adhesive of a band-aid until she was hunched and nearly naked in the middle of the bathroom with two handfuls of dripping fabric. Her flats were coming apart at the seams, and her stockings were so drenched and muddy that she abandoned any hope of salvaging them. Instead, she threw both articles of clothing in the trash before trying to ring out her dress over the sink. The twisting and squeezing yielded some measure of success, so she stuffed the dress into the plastic bag Jack had offered her.

She then began to rifle through Sarah Davis’ assorted athleisure: a pair of neon pink and green tennis shoes, socks that said namaste, two tight yoga pants, and an assortment of sporty tank tops emblazoned with bubble text that ranged from mere novelty (KEEP HARBORVIEW WEIRD) to outright suggestion (MY EYES ARE UP HERE). Adelaide picked one that said FINE LIKE WINE not because it suited her particularly but because it had the loosest fit. Both pairs of pants, however, were as form-fitting and skin-tight as the wet stockings she had just taken off, hugging every curve and divot of her legs.

In the end, she was dressed but exposed, unable to control something so simple as her appearance, hating the glimpses of herself she caught in the mirror.

Even her face seemed foreign to her. The rain had ruined her makeup, leaving streaks of mascara down her cheeks and blotchy patches of red lipstick on her mouth. Her hair hung from her in frizzing, ropey strands plastered to the sides of her face and neck. She didn’t recognize the face staring back at her with the tears rimming its wide, desperate eyes.

That other person trapped in the glass snarled, wrenched a paper towel from the dispenser, and clawed the rest of its makeup off. A moment later, it raked its nails through its hair in a biting impression of a brush, gathering the strands together in a loose ponytail with a scrunchie from Sarah’s duffle bag.

At least she had control over something.

At least she could still control the muscles of her unvarnished face, massaging out the furrows in her brow and slackening the tension in her jaw and schooling her lips into an effortless smile.

When she looked in the mirror one last time, she almost resembled herself again.

Supper was up by the time Adelaide went back upstairs. Townsfolk were gathered at the front of the chamber, salting and buttering ears of corn and taking deep, indulgent whiffs of the collard greens, laden with thick-cut bacon and leftover ham hock. Strains of jovial conversation reached her by the stairwell. How is so-and-so doing? Some weather we’re having, huh. Got any holiday plans? How old is so-and-so now? She’s where? Oh my, but they grow up so fast…

Adelaide heard Nat’s name in the mix—something about an athletic scholarship at Clemson—and felt sick again.

Her empty stomach grumbled its complaints as she turned away, but she ignored it, forcing her attention to settle on Madame Tilly, who had not joined the others for dinner. Rather, the old woman, sporting her trademark purple velvet cap and elaborate gem-encrusted beetle brooch, was still kneeling by a box of candles near the front door, lost to the world as she muttered her prayers.

Adelaide reasoned that that, at least, was a conversation she could handle.

Matilda Lawrence had been just as much a part of Adelaide’s life growing up as the Owens. For as long as she could remember, she and her father had been checking up on Madame Tilly after Wednesday service. It had been Adelaide’s earliest act of charity, a kind deed for a kind elder whose mind had wandered even in her youth. Even longer than those visits, though, Adelaide recalled her unwavering faith. As distracted as she might be elsewhere, in church, Madame Tilly was nothing but resolute and focused. Indeed, her knowledge of canticles, verses, and hymns was second only to Deacon Dellouise himself.

Adelaide used to think it would be nice to grow up and be someone like Madame Tilly: refined, devout, at peace.

Nowadays, she just barely had one of the three.

Adelaide squatted beside the prayer box, three tiered rows of tea lights set in small glass bowls. Only a few of the candles were lit, each a pinprick prayer glinting above a puddle of grey wax. She watched them flicker as she listened to Madame Tilly continue her supplications without so much as a glance in her direction.

The words were as familiar as the low, hoarse voice that mumbled them:

“That I may deliver my own salvation, I bequeath upon myself a clear mind and a strong heart. That I may shoulder my own burdens, carry my own weight, and discipline the limits of my own desires, such that I never exceed the boundaries of restraint and propriety. That I may survive the oncoming storm, I pray for clarity, fortitude, and tenacity…”

“And in so praying,” the words spilled forth from Adelaide’s marrow, deep and reluctant as every fiber of her being, “I grant upon myself such virtues as foreseen by our lady prophet.”

Madame Tilly lifted her head, blinking, and smiled up at Adelaide, slow and indulgent.

“Little Addie,” she murmured, gums stretched wide. “How are you?”

“Surviving by someone’s grace.” Adelaide didn’t know if it was her own or her father’s or Delilah’s herself. Probably wasn’t her own. “How ’bout yourself?”

“All is as we will it.”

Typical Order of Dubois bullshit response. Adelaide smiled back.

“Well, it looks like dinner’s up, if you’re hungry.”

“Oh, that’s very kind of you, but I can’t stop praying. There’ll be time to feed myself later. Harborview needs my prayers now. It is as our lady prophet says.” Madame Tilly tapped her forehead with the second knuckle of her right pointer finger, tracing a loose oval between her brows. “‘In seeing clearly, might all the Earth resolve itself in perfect and accurate order.’ Worship is the only way to a clear mind’s eye. A clear mind’s eye is the only way to a righteous world.”

Righteousness seemed a terribly inappropriate framework for understanding a natural disaster, but Adelaide’s good sense told her not to argue.

Instead, she picked up one of the lit prayer candles and tilted it forward. The melted wax pooled to one side, threatening to drown the pinpoint of light quivering inside the glass. When she narrowed her eyes, the flame blossomed into a thin white line across her vision. Its expansion was an optical illusion, she knew, but if she focused hard enough, she could trick herself into thinking that the glass was heating up, cracking, splintering, shattering…

“We could all use some clarity just about now,” Adelaide remarked as she spun the bowl, watching the silvery wax swirl like wine.

“Don’t I know it… You seeking clarity yourself, little Addie? I haven’t seen you around here in a while.”

“Y’know how it is.” Eyes open, eyes closed, flame thinning and widening and winking like blinding starlight, glass hotter and hotter against the pads of her fingers. “One day, you’re suddenly an adult, and you gotta take some time to figure things out.”

“I’ve been an adult for quite a while, dearie. I did all my figuring out long ago.”

“And how’d that go for you?”

“She simplified things a good bit.” Madame Tilly nodded toward the back of the church, and Adelaide followed her gaze to the oil painting of Delilah Dubois. The prophet’s watchful steely eyes stared back from underneath a windswept cowl. “I was a wild and wayward soul once upon a time, but I wandered back to her eventually, and she set me on the straight and narrow… You could always come back too, y’know. Give it all a second chance.”

Adelaide’s grip on the bowl tightened.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Ah, but showing up is only half the work.” Adelaide glanced back at her out of the corner of her eye. Madame Tilly responded by touching her finger to her forehead again. “You still have to have faith, dearie. Otherwise, it’s only a paper moon.

“That was the first lesson Lady Delilah taught us, after all. She saw the end of days on the horizon, the plagues and the storms and the fires that would burn this world to its core, and she turned to prayer. Not just mumbling a few half-hearted words, you understand, but complete dedication of body and soul to her worship. That was her salvation.

“And it’s saved Harborview dozens of times since then. Right before you were born, actually, we had another hurricane. This one got so close the state put us under an evacuation notice, so your daddy rented a whole fleet of buses and he went out in his jeep with his megaphone to round folks up and make sure they got out safe and sound before the storm got bad.

“But instead of leaving with them, he and Melanie came back here, and the three of us set about doing what Delilah mandated we do in the face of travesty. We dedicated ourselves to our piety. We didn’t eat, we didn’t drink, we didn’t sleep, we just prayed.

“And we were rewarded, as Delilah said we would be. For all those weather boys saying we would be wiped off the map, the hurricane only grazed us. Oh, there was some superficial damage to a few buildings on the Docks, and we lost the old community center to the flooding, but we survived. Harborview survived, as it always has, on the back of its own self-efficacy.

“That is the power of faith, child: making divine and mortal providence one in the same.”

But much of Madame Tilly’s sermon had fallen on deaf ears, for Adelaide could not let go of the thought of her mother holed up in this church listening to the world end around her. She pictured her crouched before this same prayer box, hands clenched, eyes shut, trembling.

Had she wanted to stay? Or had she been coerced, her husband never being one to let his things wander too far from his domain? She was a devout woman, but did her faith hold? Did she believe Wyatt when he told her devotion was the only way to salvation?

Did she have any other choice but to believe, to paper a smile over the worry and go through the motions of her worship while her fear gutted her from the inside out? How many screams and sobs did she smother because doubt was still the worse sin in the eyes of her husband?

Did she nurse some secret seed of resentment toward him for condemning her to die alongside him?

Adelaide’s own fear spiraled as sudden as a lightning strike. It was an old anxiety at this point, but it hadn’t yet lost its edge or its weight: that moment of feeling the entire ocean bearing down on her chest. Too tight to move, too heavy to breathe, just the water in her lungs trying to drag her down.

Trapped.

Crack!

The candle holder exploded.

Madame Tilly yelped as glass and wax showered the ground. The still-burning wick hit the carpet. A chorus of gasps and shrieks and questioning grunts surged from the other side of the church.

But all Adelaide knew was the flame. The orange glimmer cut through the fear, and for a blinding moment, she had that holy clarity that the Order of Dubois revered so much: a crystal-clear image of the church reduced to smoldering ash and burning rubble, so real she could taste the heat and smoke sweet on her tongue. If she just focused…

Some smell like ozone and chlorine hit Adelaide square in the nose. Her vision blurred, head swimming as that sublime image warped before her eyes. She tried to hold onto it, but it vanished out from underneath her, like missing the last step in the dark. For a moment, she reeled in the free-fall, stomach plummeting and body lurching, staggering back onto her heels.

Then, her vision settled. She was back in the church. It was normal and whole. The flame was out. And her father was staring hard at her from across the room.

Outside, the thunder boomed as loud as any pipe organ, deep enough to shake the church’s foundations.

The power went out.

The congregation gasped again as the darkness took them. The precious few points of candlelight were quickly joined by the glare of cellphones at the front of the nave. Madame Tilly merely shook her head and resumed her praying, while Adelaide stared at the faces huddled near the altar, cast in a waxy and uneven sheen by the weak flashlights they clutched to their chests. An anxious murmur bubbled up amongst them until their deacon cleared his throat so loud even the rain seemed to hold its breath for him.

“There’s no need to panic, folks.” Wyatt Dellouise only owned a flip phone, so for a moment, his voice seemed to emanate from the darkness itself, ever-present and ever-vigilant. Duke Owens switched on a camping lantern, suffusing the back of the church in a too-white glow. Wyatt appeared, his features ghastly as the light carved steep shadows into his countenance. “We knew this was a possibility, but the church has a generator precisely for this situation. I’ll go out back and turn it on. Duke, you mind if I borrow a flashlight or a lantern?”

“Of course, Wyatt, and if you need someone else to go out with you—”

“I’ll go.”

The glaring cellphones all turned toward Adelaide as she stretched her hand up into the air. A stuttered silence followed. Her father’s thin silhouette shifted.

“That’s awful kind of you, Addie, but—”

“You shouldn't have to go out there alone, Daddy!” Adelaide interrupted brightly. “I wanna help.”

He couldn’t deny her this, not when she was playing the dutiful, smiling daughter he wanted so badly to have back. With a nod and armed with raincoats and a high-powered flashlight, her father led her out the back door of the church.

Stepping back out into the storm, Adelaide’s mind wandered to her other childhood best friend, the one she tried her damnedest not to think about. Once upon a time, before Adelaide had ruined everything, Zak Ibis had been the genderqueer prom king to her prom queen. As the self-proclaimed arbiter of good taste and cultural relevance in a backwater town he resented, Zak could deliver gospel as well as any priest over DairyQueen blizzards or in the Barracuda’s locker rooms. Their vast but shallow reserves of amateurish expertise included computer science, film, sports, economics, and numerous pop science areas like sleep health, fad diets, and wolfpack dynamics as allegories for the human condition.

One such lecture came to mind as the first splash of rain hit Adelaide’s face, turned up toward a patch of clouds where the faint light of the moon filtered through the storm. She remembered one of her many late night break-ins to the lighthouse down the street from the Dellouise Mansion. With Nat giving her a boost, Adelaide would shimmy into the cracked second story window and open the door. Nat provided the snacks, Zak the weak booze, and they’d spend hours playing card games or listening to Zak pontificate.

Over cold, congealed nachos and watered down beer, Zak had once opined about the mammalian diving reflex— in his words, how to trick your lizard brain into thinking the world’s not ending by being in some water about it.

And in the storm’s totality, it did feel like being swallowed up by the sea: the whole world disappeared in the torrent, no ground, no horizon, no body, just the numbness where the droplets pelted against her skin.

Zak was right, it was kind of relaxing.

Would that she actually were in the ocean, sinking into the abyss so that her corpse could give rise to untold and monstrous ecosystems deep beneath the tides. Instead, the swinging of her father’s flashlight, cutting sharp through all that wet nothing, reminded Adelaide of where she was.

“The generator’s just back here.”

“Mhm.”

“Hold the flashlight, will you?”

Adelaide lifted the light up to illuminate the boxy grey generator on the ground and the paneling in the wall above it, which her father began to fuss with. She watched him work in silence, trying to puzzle out the function of the multitude of switches and blinking lights. She didn’t have the faintest idea what her father was doing with them.

Then again, that was the way the two of them functioned, wasn’t it? She didn’t have to know much of anything because daddy dearest could always solve all of her problems.

The irony of being dependent on a man who had dedicated his life to preaching self-sufficiency was so bitter that Adelaide drew in on herself, shivering in Mary Owens’ raincoat and Sarah Davis’ yoga outfit and despising the kindness they had shown her.

“What are you going to do if we ever have to evacuate?!” she shouted over the roar of the storm.

“We won’t need to evacuate,” he responded evenly.

“Sure, not this time around, but there’s always next time, ain’t there, and the time after that? We have a million fucking storms every summer, what are you going to do when one of them finally threatens to wipe this miserable shithole off the coastline?”

Her father’s hands paused, hovering over some button or another. Adelaide could not see his face, but she watched the outline of his Adam’s apple quiver.

“Watch your language, Addie,” he mumbled at last. He pushed the button, and light flooded out of the stained glass window suspended above their heads.

“That’s not an answer, and you fucking know it! Tell me what you would do!”

Desperation seized her as he finally turned toward her, mouth set like a tombstone to match the hard granite of his eyes. Adelaide could not feel her lips spluttering around her words, but she tasted the rainwater against her teeth.

“Would you let me go?!” She came so close to pleading that she wanted to retch. Barely swallowing the bile, she spat, “Or would you trap me here like you trapped Mama?!”

What little color was left drained from her father’s face.

“Addie, don’t—”

“You’d rather see me dead than gone!” The tempest didn’t stop for her like it did for him, but she could match its fury. “You’d let me drown before you’d let me leave!”

“I’d— I’d protect you!” He reached for her, stammering out familiar pleas and supplications. Adelaide shrunk away from his grasp. “I’d keep you safe, like I always have!”

“You’d just keep me!”

He tried to grab her again. Adelaide stepped backwards, slipped on the slick grass, and plummeted to the ground. He lunged to catch her, but she slapped away his hands as she fell. She’d rather have the pain: the sharp ache of a future bruise thrumming through her thighs and up her spine, the scrape of her knuckles against the ground, the twist of her wrist as she held onto the flashlight like a liferaft.

Standing above her, Wyatt’s face contorted, no longer the picture of the austere deacon but of a tired, sad old man.

“Addie, please,” he whispered, extending his hand again, “please just stop this. You’re only hurting yourself.”

In response, Adelaide chucked the flashlight as hard as she could in the other direction.

Somewhere in the darkness above her came a sigh, followed by heavy footsteps headed toward the flashlight, which had rolled to a stop near the fence of the cemetery. Still, Adelaide made no move to pick herself up. Instead, she leaned back to lay down in the mud, letting the rain wash over her.

She couldn’t see the sky.

She couldn’t see much of anything, but she knew Harborview’s geography well enough to draw a straight line from her outstretched fingertips to her father’s house, less than a block away but lost in the storm. She could extend that same, unerring line through to the lighthouse, that last bastion of unspoiled childhood, and she could stretch it out further to the ocean beyond.

She could feel it out there, roiling just out of sight. And if she closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, she could almost feel it inside her too. In her mind’s eye, she saw a wave as tall as the sky cresting over the town, poised just before breaking. It would flood every street, level most buildings, wash away thousands of lives, erase Harborview from the face of the Earth and drag its fractured remains out to sea… and maybe that could free her.

Maybe it would be enough to call her father’s bluff and scare him into breaking the magic that tethered her to Harborview.

Or maybe the magic would break on its own if there was no Harborview.

As soon as it had occurred to her, Adelaide couldn’t let that thought go. The flood, the catastrophe, the destruction, the death. The horror sunk its fangs deep into her, gnawing the edges of morality and logic alike, and she let that callousness fester because it burned oh so tenderly even as she was slowly losing feeling in her limbs.

Why, after all, should she care about the wellbeing of the people who showed up twice a week to suckle at the teat of her father’s dogma despite everything he had done to her?

Why shouldn’t they drown too?

Who was Adelaide to deny the prophecies of her Lady Delilah?

#adelaide posting #okay shes DONE #topping out at 6000 words #this was legit originally just going to be the convo about what adelaide & wyatt would do if there was an evacuation notice #and it was just going to be a bit of dialogue in their house #and then i was like 'wait wouldnt wyatt be at the church during a shelter in place advisory'#and things........ spiraled from there #i have so many meta thoughts but im trying not to add too much commentary for the integrity of the piece #just. ugh. im screaming a lot inside.

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