The Patient Flood

What it looks like, and what it does

A kitchen with clear water to the waist, calm, small objects floating. A wedding photograph on the wall, dry. The family sitting on the stairs. On the table, afterward, one teacup coated in grey river silt.

Rises about a hand's breadth an hour. Does not reach the upper floor. Leaves without a sound.

What is known

The Harlan house flooded three times in nine years. There was no burst pipe, no rain, no neighbour's water.

The flood arrives slowly enough to leave. It is clear, cold and still. It recedes after four days, leaving no damp, and a thin layer of river silt on a single object that the family cannot explain. The object is always something they were about to throw away.

What it can do

• Fills a house with clear water from no source over several days
• Marks one object with silt

Where it stops

• Never reaches the upper floor
• Damages nothing it covers except the marked object

An encounter

Harlan sat on the landing for four days with a flask and a radio. On the third day the water was at her chest and warm. She said she felt as though it were waiting for her to say something. On the fourth it went. The silt was on a photograph frame she had been meaning to throw out, and she put it back on the mantel.

Delphine Harlan, householder, The Harlan house, Mill Row, Three floods across nine years

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Silt samples from the three floods are chemically identical and unlike any local soil.
• incomplete: In seven recorded floods in other houses, the marked object later featured in the last conversation held before a household broke up.
• rumor: That the flood only comes to houses that are about to be left.

Still unresolved

The silt matches a river that was dammed in 1931 and now lies beneath a reservoir forty kilometres away.

Where it has been recorded

• Mill Row (confirmed) — Recorded by Delphine Harlan, householder.

Stories about it

• The Patient Flood on Victoria Street (Grotesque encounter, 4 min) — A widow living in a dry terraced house on Victoria Street wakes to find water standing a finger deep on the stairs, rising each night by a single step, and a courteous voice on the landing asking her, kindly, to move upstairs.

Connected entities

• The Inland Tide — Both bring the sea or a river into a house. The Tide is regular and kind. The Flood is neither of those things, and is the more careful.