Abstract
The teacher can’t hear the children over all this monsoon racket, all the zillion spoons whacking the rusty roofs, all the wicked tin streams flipping full-grown bucks off their hooves. Everywhere there used to be a river, there’s a bigger river now. Every hard face on the block is sopping. Even the court where girls from St. Ignominius ran the roughneck boys off to play their own three-on-three in plaid skirts and church shoes for cash? —forget it. The whole city’s a flash flood with brawn enough to flush trucks sideways down the capitol’s widest drives: the crushed tonnage bobs around a bit at the foot of some Spanish bastard’s statue, before it stalls and pools on white church steps. Brute pilgrims. Face it, paddling dogs won’t make it, so children got no shot. But quick thinking, the teacher lashes her students, two at a time, with wire and stray twine. She binds them across their breasts to trees and metal posts lining the street’s half flooded walk. No goddamned way, she swears. She won’t let one little one be washed out, even if their wriggling makes their armpits bleed, even if the kids must watch a good wood chair catch in an eddy, then swirl off. You can’t wish away the deluge. You can’t vanish the bloated carnage-waters. But the tykes in crew cuts and pigtails, still fastened to shafts and trunks in ragged rows, will survive. For now, their teacher has made them safe by building an orchard of them in the middle of a city road, this small chorus of young hard fruit, this little grove moaning.