The river had already started to shrink by June. From the field behind our house, I could see the mudflats widening, long slick ribbons that caught the sun like dull coins. My father said it was the Army Corps of Engineers drawing down the water, testing how the flow would settle once the dam closed. To me, it looked like someone had pulled a plug too early– as if the river was being drained of its secrets in plain view.

That summer I turned sixteen, which felt like an age that was supposed to matter but didn’t, I didn’t have a car. My friends were scattering – one working at his uncle’s hardware store in town, another gone to summer camp. I stayed home. Every morning, I followed the path down to the waterline, carrying the little red notebook I’d taken from my father’s desk. It was filled with half-faded pencil marks from when he kept track of corn prices and the rainfall in April. I started making my own lists: the names of birds I saw along the bank, the height of the water against the pilings, anything that seemed like it might matter once the river was gone.

By July, the valley was pricked with orange stakes, thin as matchsticks, each one marking what would soon be underwater. In the evenings I walked through the meadows, the markers catching the last light like warning flares, and tried to picture the reservoir rising over them. It was difficult to imagine  –  the barns, the low stone walls, the porches with peeling paint all gone and smoothed into the surface of a man-made lake. When I passed the house where my neighbor once kept goats, I lingered at the gate, staring at the rusted latch. It seemed important to remember how it felt beneath my hand before the water took it.

People in town talked about the money. My aunt, who lived farther up the valley, said the buyout was more than her place was worth, that she could move closer to Roanoke, maybe even get a dishwasher this time. Others, like Mr. Gray who raised cattle by the bridge, said no check could pay for generations buried in the churchyard by the bend. He refused to leave, and it became a kind of rumor that he’d stay until the water rose around his boots. Caleb said he’d swim out to him when it happened, just to see if the old man would wave. He grinned when he said it, but I couldn’t tell if he meant it as a joke. 

My mother wouldn’t talk about it at all. She kept her head down in the kitchen, humming tunelessly while she shelled beans. My father said it was progress, that the electricity would be good for the region, that it would bring jobs and light. But even he sometimes stopped mid-sentence at the table, staring out the window toward the ridge, as though he, too, felt the tug of something slipping away.

I kept walking the river every evening. The water smelled stronger as it pulled back, moss and rot thick in the air. I picked up small things and carried them home in my pockets: a rusted nail, a feather, the handle of a broken teacup. I laid them in rows along my windowsill, the way other kids taped up posters of bands. My collection was evidence, though of what I didn’t know. That the river had been here. That we had lived beside it. That not everything could be taken, no matter how much water they poured over it.

*

The county sent letters with embossed seals and return envelopes. My father stacked them on the kitchen counter without opening them, as if paper itself had no power until you let the words loose. A man in a blue truck came up our drive one morning to speak with him about relocation money, but my father kept working on the mower, the engine drowning out anything the man tried to say. Eventually, the truck left.

In town, the talk turned bitter. People stood outside the post office in small knots, arguing about whether it was better to take the money now or wait to be forced out later. At the diner, someone scrawled DAMN THE DAM on a napkin holder in red pen. Someone else taped a pamphlet from the power company to the bulletin board beside it, glossy photographs of a lake that didn’t exist yet  –  fishermen in aluminum boats, children splashing in water clear as glass. I stared at the picture every time we went in, trying to line it up with the valley I knew, but it was like staring at an invented country.

At night, I lay awake listening to the river. From my bedroom, the sound was faint, almost like the turning of pages. Some nights it was so quiet I wondered if I only imagined it. My mother said the silence would be better once the reservoir came, fewer mosquitoes, fewer floods. But I found myself counting on that sound, even when it was thin, as if it were keeping track of me.

The Fourth of July passed without fireworks. The town usually gathered by the bridge for a small show; a few rockets, some sparklers handed out to the kids. But this year no one wanted to organize it. Too much bad feeling, my father said. Instead, a few neighbors lit sparklers in their driveways, pinwheels of light spinning and dying in the dark. From our porch, I could see the sparks fade before they reached the road.

 I kept to the river as the summer pressed on. The bank was lower than I’d ever seen it, the stones along the edge hot enough to burn my bare feet. Fish crowded into narrow channels, their fins breaking the surface as they fought for space. Once, I saw a heron standing so still in the shallows it looked carved from the air itself. I wrote about it in the notebook, though the words never seemed like enough.

One afternoon, walking farther than usual, I came across a place where the water had pulled back from a row of sycamores, their roots suddenly exposed, pale and twisted like bones. I ran my fingers along the bark and thought about how the roots had once been invisible, hidden in the cool dark of the earth. Now they were stranded in the open, waiting for the water to come back or for the sun to finish them off.

When I returned home that evening, my father asked if I’d seen anyone near the river  –  surveyors, loiterers, anyone from the Corps. I told him no. He nodded but didn’t say anything more, just wiped his hands on a rag and went back to oiling the hinges of the shed. I wondered what he thought I might stumble into, and if he was afraid for me or for the river itself.

*

 The first house came down in August. I was walking home from the river when I heard the machinery  –  the low grind of an engine, the sharp metal bite of gears. At the edge of town, a crew had gathered around the old Millers’ place. A yellow excavator stood crooked in the yard, its arm arched like some animal lowering its head to feed. The porch had already been torn away, boards stacked in a neat pile that looked almost polite beside the ruin.

A few neighbors stood along the roadside, watching. No one spoke. Dust lifted into the air with every blow of the machine, drifting across the fields until the house itself began to dissolve into it. I saw Mrs. Miller’s curtains flutter once before they were swallowed up in the collapse.

I stayed longer than I meant to, notebook clutched against my chest. The sound was both thrilling and sickening, like the first crack of thunder before a storm. I couldn’t look away. Here was proof that none of us were waiting anymore  –  the valley was already being emptied.

That night, my father didn’t come in for supper. I found him sitting on the overlook, staring at the river as though measuring it against what he’d seen. When I sat beside him, he asked if I’d noticed the smell. I told him I had  –  a sharp, metallic tang like wet nails rusting in the sun. He nodded as though that settled something.

The next day, orange stakes appeared closer to our land.

*

As I was wandering, I saw Caleb in the lot behind the high school where the marching band practiced. The field was cracked and yellow, dotted with orange survey flags that had blown loose from the valley and landed here like seeds that didn’t know where to root. He was throwing rocks at the goalpost, one after another, as if it owed him something.

When he noticed me, he grinned without stopping, teeth clenched tight like the grin was holding something back. “You want to help?” he asked, handing me a stone. I tossed it weakly, and it bounced nowhere near the post. He laughed hard enough to spit. “Jesus, you throw like my aunt.”

We spent an hour hurling rocks, collecting more when we ran out, until our arms ached. Neither of us hit the post. At some point, Caleb climbed the bleachers, tore a strip from his T-shirt with his teeth then tied it around his forehead like a bandana. It made him look ridiculous, but also like someone who might actually win a fight.

When he came down, he pressed the sweat-soaked fabric into my palm. “Your turn,” he said. I didn’t put it on. I just held it, damp and sour with him, and he let me.

Later, when it was too dark to see the goalpost, we lay on the hot asphalt. Caleb stretched his arms out like a starfish and said, “You know, they’ll flood the graveyard too. Whole skeletons floating around in there, bumping into fishermen’s legs.” He laughed until he coughed. I didn’t laugh. I pictured it the way he said – bones drifting up like minnows, catching in nets.

We didn’t say goodbye when we left. He walked toward town. I walked toward home. I still had the strip of shirt in my pocket, rolled tight as a fuse.

*

 A week later, Caleb showed up at our place without knocking. I heard him before I saw him, the rattle of something glass in his hands. He came around back carrying two jars filled with river water and sealed with mismatched lids. One had a dead crayfish floating belly-up. The other was just silt, thick as chocolate milk.

“Gifts,” he said, setting them on the porch rail like they were holy offerings. My mother glanced at them once through the kitchen window, made a face, and went back to the sink.

 Caleb grinned at me. “We should drink it.”

“We’re not drinking that.”

 “Fine.” He pried open the one with the crayfish, stuck a finger in, and smeared the water across my forearm. It dried sticky, left a faint river-smell that clung through supper.

That night, I found the jars still sweating on the porch. I carried them up to my room and lined them on the windowsill with my other relics  –  the nail, the teacup handle, the feather. Caleb’s jars didn’t fit.

The next time I saw him, he had shaved his head with his father’s clippers, leaving uneven stripes of scalp showing through. “You like it?” he asked, rubbing his skull until it went red. He had a scratch above one ear, half-scabbed. I told him it looked stupid. He laughed like that was the point.

We sat on the hood of his father’s truck, parked crooked in the church lot. He cracked open a can of peaches and ate with his fingers, juice running down his arm. When he was done, he flung the tin into the grass. “Think it’ll float?” he asked, as if the flood had already started.

I watched the can wobble in the weeds, catching moonlight in its syrup. Caleb leaned back against the windshield and burped loud enough to startle a dog down the street. He smelled like peaches, sweat, and gasoline.

I wanted to tell him he was wasting things, the way he always did. But the truth was, I liked it. I liked that he could make everything temporary, already half-ruined, like he knew exactly what the water would do and was just getting ahead of it.

*

Caleb showed up one evening with a paper sack of fireworks, the cheap kind sold out of somebody’s garage on the edge of town. He dumped them across my bedspread without asking to come in  –  bottle rockets, smoke bombs, a few Roman candles dented from the ride.

“Where’d you get these?” I asked.

“Stole them from my cousin,” he said, then pulled a smoke bomb from the pile, rolled it in his palm like a marble. “We’ll light them by the river.”

We did. The rockets sputtered sideways into the water, hissing like they were being swallowed whole. The smoke bombs coughed purple and green clouds that clung to our shirts. Caleb whooped until his voice cracked. I was laughing too hard to stop him when he dropped one still spitting sparks into his pocket, yelped, and slapped at himself until it went out. His T-shirt burned through in a perfect coin-sized hole. He smelled of sulfur and singed cotton.

Afterward we lay in the grass, the valley wide and black around us. Caleb was quiet for once, his chest heaving from running in circles through the smoke. He reached over and touched the place on my arm where he’d smeared river water the week before. His fingers were rough, calloused, but the touch itself was light, like he was checking to see if I was still there.

“Doesn’t even smell like anything anymore,” he said.

I nodded, though I could smell him just fine  –  sulfur, sweat, a sweetness that might’ve been peaches still clinging to him days later. The grass itched, the smoke drifted off in ribbons, and his hand stayed on my arm until the last embers died out.

*

By late August the heat made everything feel swollen  –  the air, the ground, even my own skin. The river had pulled so far back that patches of cracked clay spread where there used to be current. I kept my notebook filled with sketches of roots, animal tracks, anything that struck me as worth saving. I pressed leaves flat between the pages until the spine bulged. Sometimes I wondered if I was inventing the details, if the river had ever been as wide as I remembered, or if Caleb had always been this strange and I was only noticing it now.

One afternoon he came to the house carrying a shoebox full of matchbooks. Some were from gas stations in town, others from restaurants I’d never heard of, all damp and curling. He dumped them on my bedroom floor like a jackpot.

“Found them in my dad’s shed,” he said. “We should light them all, see how long it takes.”

Before I could answer, he struck one, let it burn to his fingertips, and dropped it into the shoebox lid. We crouched over it while the tiny flame ate through the pile, sulfur sharp in the room. My mother banged on the door when she smelled it, and Caleb clapped the lid over the whole thing, smothering it. He was grinning so wide his gums showed.

Later, he pocketed a handful of the charred books and slipped one into my notebook when he thought I wasn’t looking.

The next time I saw him, we biked down to the river. The bank was slick with algae, the smell ripe enough to sting. Caleb stripped off his shirt, waded in up to his knees, and started flinging rocks at the opposite bank. When I told him he’d fall in, he barked a laugh and did a handstand in the shallows, legs wobbling like antennae. His head came up slimed green, hair plastered flat.

“Beautiful, right?” he said, spreading his arms like a preacher. His chest was mottled with mosquito bites, raw from scratching.

We stayed until dusk, when the mosquitoes got unbearable. He caught one on his forearm, pressed it until his skin smeared red, then rubbed it onto my shoulder like war paint. “Now you’re marked,” he said. I didn’t wipe it off.

At night, I’d line the relics on my windowsill in rows  –  the jars he’d brought, the charred matchbook, the pebble he once shoved into my pocket without explanation. I couldn’t tell anymore if I was keeping the river or keeping him. Sometimes I dreamed the water was already rising, and when I woke the sheets smelled faintly of algae, though I knew it was just my own sweat.

Caleb kept turning up at odd hours. Once at dawn, tapping my window with a stick until I climbed out. We walked to the churchyard, where the graves sloped down toward the valley. He lay flat on the grass, arms crossed, and told me to measure him for his coffin. When I refused, he grabbed my wrist and stretched it along his ribs himself. His skin was hot, buzzing with some fever that didn’t break.

Another night, he showed up with a pocketful of coins and made me toss them into the river one by one. “Offerings,” he said. When I asked “to what,” he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Just throw.” We listened to each coin plink and vanish. He pressed the last one into my palm  –  a dime, warped and bent. “Keep that one. Proof you didn’t lose everything.” I hid it inside the notebook.

By then, the orange stakes had reached our back pasture. My father walked the fence line with a hammer, tapping the posts as though sound could tell him how much longer they had. My mother stayed in the kitchen, humming tunelessly, refusing to open the letters still stacked by the sink. And I kept waiting for Caleb’s knock, half-dreading, half-starving for it.

*

By September, the stakes were in our yard, neat rows of orange slicing through the pasture like warning flags. My father stood at the kitchen window each morning with his coffee, staring at them as if they might move on their own. He wouldn’t speak of it, wouldn’t touch the letters piling on the counter. My mother had started baking bread again, as if feeding us could hold the house in place. The smell of yeast rose through the rooms, thick and wet, impossible to ignore.

Caleb came that evening, climbing through my window instead of using the door. He carried a mason jar with something floating inside. At first, I thought it was another crayfish, but when he held it up, I saw the body of a small bird, feathers plastered to its skin, one wing bent wrong.

“Found it in the road,” he said. “We should give it a funeral before the water does.”

I told him that was stupid, but he was already pulling me out the window. We crossed the field in silence, the grass slick with dew, the stakes catching the moonlight behind us. At the riverbank he dug a shallow hole with his hands, dirt packing under his nails. He placed the jar inside like it was something precious, then shoved the soil back over it.

“Say something,” he told me.

I shook my head. He grabbed my wrist, pressed my palm flat to the fresh mound, and said, “Fine. I’ll do it.” His voice was louder than it needed to be, carrying across the empty valley. “Here lies what’s left. Something small. Something the water can’t take.”

I felt ridiculous, hand pressed to the dirt while mosquitoes whined in my ears, but there was a weight to it, too. Caleb’s hand covered mine, warm and rough. He held it there longer than the words required.

When we stood, he wiped his dirty fingers down the front of my shirt, leaving streaks like claw marks. “Now you’re part of it,” he said. His grin was feral, but his eyes weren’t.

We sat in the grass until the air cooled. Caleb talked about nothing  –  the taste of his mother’s soup, how his cousin got drunk and shaved off his eyebrows  –  stories that meant less than the way he told them, quick and scattered, like he was afraid of the quiet. I listened, letting the dirt dry stiff on my shirt, feeling as though we’d started something we couldn’t explain to anyone else.

Before he left, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a river stone. Flat, round, the size of a biscuit. He pressed it against my lips like he was feeding me, then shoved it into my hand. “Keep it,” he said. “Proof the valley’s still here.”

I didn’t tell him I already had too many proofs  –  the feather, the nail, the charred matchbook, the warped dime. I slid the stone into my pocket anyway, where it thudded against my thigh the whole walk home.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept replaying the way Caleb’s hand had closed over mine in the dirt, firm but not rough, like he wanted to steady me. I stared at the ceiling, listening for the river’s faint rush. It sounded thinner than ever, stretched tight, like it might snap.

In the morning, my father was gone before dawn. The mower sat idle in the yard, dew shining on the seat. My mother had lined three loaves of bread on the counter, their crusts cracking open as they cooled. The smell was so strong it nearly choked me. I ate nothing.

*

The last time I saw Caleb, he came at dusk, carrying a bucket half-full of river mud. He tracked it across the kitchen floor without asking, ignoring my mother’s sharp intake of breath as he went straight to my room. When I followed, he was already spreading the mud across my windowsill, thick and wet, over the rows of relics I’d been keeping all summer. The jars, the feather, the dime  –  all coated in brown, sealed in place like fossils.

    “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Keeping them safe,” he said. His hands were coated in mud to the wrists, nails packed with grit. He pressed one handful flat against the glass until it oozed down in rivulets. “If you can’t see them, they won’t get taken.”

I didn’t argue. I just stood there, watching him coat every scrap until the sill was a slick, dark altar. He grinned when he was done, the grin that always looked like it might crack open into something else, and then he leaned close enough that his forehead brushed mine, leaving a smear of mud.

“Now it’s yours,” he said. “Don’t wash it off.”

The next morning, the mud had dried in ridges, stiff as clay. Caleb didn’t come back. Not that day, not the day after. His family’s house was boarded by the end of the week. The truck gone. The yard empty. No note, no goodbye, just absence.

*

The water started rising in October. It wasn’t sudden  –  just a steady creep, swallowing the lowest fields first, then the fence posts, then the road. From the bluff  –  or what was left of it  –  I watched the surface spread, smooth and blank, erasing everything I knew how to name.

Inside, the windowsill was still caked in dried mud. My mother told me to scrape it clean, but I couldn’t. I’d taken the notebook down once, flipped through its warped pages, but the words looked false now, the drawings childish. I left it on the sill and let the mud crust it shut.

One evening, as the reservoir swallowed the churchyard, I walked to the bank alone. The air smelled metallic, sharp as a nail. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the flat stone Caleb had pressed to my lips weeks earlier. 

I crouched at the water’s edge and set the stone down, not skipping it, not throwing it  –  just leaving it there for the water to take. A small offering, the way Caleb would’ve wanted. Proof, he’d called it. Proof of what, I wasn’t sure anymore.

When I walked home, my palms were still stained faintly with dirt from where I’d carried the stone. I held them up to the fading light, brown smudges across my skin, and thought about Caleb’s hands pressing mine to the ground, steady and rough, both at once.

The smell of bread met me at the door. My father sat silent at the table, my mother hummed over the cooling loaves. Behind them, the orange stakes leaned crooked, half-drowned already.

I didn’t wash my hands.