Steam floats off the water in a genuine, claw-footed tub. Of course it's genuine, this is New Orleans, in a friend of a friend's dry home. A real bath after weeks of rushing through quick, tepid showers, coaxing drips of shampoo from the bottom of bottles and drying off with used, damp towels.
After scrounging in a kitchen I don't know, the red and blue box of matches comes to me like a prize. I pull crisp cellophane off the vanilla candle and light it. Then I pour white crystals from a carton of epsom salts into the steaming water.
Still haunting me
are the reassuring words I gave to my mother when we bought the house, "Our yard is backed by a 30-foot high, concrete wall. The canal will never breach."
The bath water smells of chlorine. I'm grateful it doesn't smell of the waxy mud I've spent the day scraping off the dishes and wine bottles pulled out of my levee-wrecked house.
Under the swamp stink there is something that burns, like the smell of a petro refinery at full blast. The rot wraps around your throat and fills your pores. It grabs you at the entry to any neighborhood where dark brown lines stain the sides of houses, pink insulation and drywall spill onto the street like guts, and the trees stick out of the dirt like kindling.
I sink into the hot water, white flesh blushing in the heat. My defenses melt as the salt water takes me. I float, letting the sea pull the poison and grief from my skin. As flesh, muscle and bone dissolve, I forget my rage against the floods.
Reprinted with permission from Flashquake, Spring 2006. http://flashquake.org