A Choir of Ill Children by Tom Piccirilli

were stepping on yours too much. If you’re going to do something then do it right. You’re leaving tonight, Fred, and you’re going without Sarah.”
    He bucks like a dying fish and I slip my hand aside so I can hear him. “No! My arm! Hey, no, you—”
    “My brother loves her and she’s starting to fall for him, I think. Get over the fact that it’s a little weird.”
    “A little! Ow! Oh God . . . help, listen . . .”
    It will finish badly when she dries out, I suppose, and probably end with madness, but almost everything does. I tell him, “Be pleased. It provides reassurance, a new hope for all. Take heart in that.”
    I let go of him. Even though his arm is broken, the relief of my turning him loose overwhelms him and Fred groans and pants on his knees. I stuff a thousand bucks in his pocket, drag him down the hall, and shove him through the front door out across the porch. He bounces down the steps onto the lawn, moaning in tune with the cadence of Jonah’s poetry and all the loons and katydids.
    Maggie, huddled in the willows, maintains her vigil.
     
    T HUNDER HANGS HEAVILY IN THE FURIOUS CLOUDS TO the east as the storm approaches. The river is already in a frenzy, half a foot higher than normal. The jut of cruel chins is outlined by lightning, and the sky is the color of a three-day-old bruise. Electrical surges burn out and explode bulbs all over the house, sending shards of glass soaring. Even the dog kicker must be staying in. No size twelve tracks are found in the mud, no dirty prints have been left on fur. Dogs are accepting treats from their owners again, showing a little tail-wagging. But they continue to howl, and you know there’s a reason.
    When the rains finally come, the world is given a new perspective. Not whitewashed or cleansed, but slickly covered over and gleaming. Water pulses beneath windowpanes. It crawls across trees and houses, swallowing and drinking us in. You watch it arching over steeples and cliffs and the cabbage palms, buffeting, constantly beating and vying for your attention.
    Trucks going by tear up the brutal din with separate gentler sounds: splashes, splurges, crunches, and whines. Anything is better than the pitter-patter and constant thrum of wind coming for you. Broadhead skinks skitter down walls, leaping into the water. The lightning is frantic and raging, that sudden charge making your hair bristle and skin tighten. Your ears pop. Fires erupt in the woods but the downpour immediately snuffs them out. You almost want to see the wild burning because it’s something that can exist, momentarily, in conflict with the storm.
    The parking lot of Leadbetter’s is abruptly littered with corpses. Three drunks in two nights are found drowned in sixteen-inch puddles to one side of the curb where the grade dips. Two-hundred-and-thirty-pound men with forty-inch beer guts are discovered drifting with their key chains in hand, slowly circling a stopped drain. You pass out during a storm like this and you’re dead.
    Shanty houses in the bog town are consumed in avalanches of mud and slide into the swamp. Ramshackle hovels at the edge of Potts County simply fall to pieces and families are forced to move into their trucks and chicken coops.
    Dodi, who used to enjoy dancing in the rain, running around the yard and begging me to join her on the swing, comes to loathe the gurgling, sluicing water thudding at the roof. She can’t sleep and lies awake crimped at the foot of the bed. She wants company and I move with her into a different room, watching her nervously curl and uncurl.
    She doesn’t often seem to mind being traded away by her mother, but tonight seems to be an exception. Dodi scowls at the ceiling. Velma Coots knows spells to keep a tempest like this at bay, potions intended to hold the hidden evils back. The thumping and tapping at the walls is like the hammering of the damned waiting to get inside. Why they’d want to, I don’t know.
    She covers her ears and lets