Flood

The dark green of the water rubbed a slimy back against the double-glazed door.  “The seals are holding,” Amanda said; the pair of them submariners trapped in a deep sea trench.

“I want my wife and I want my kids,”  Alexander said, unable to stop himself.  

Amanda looked at him, cheeks glowing as if from a slap. “Phone them.”

“I can’t.”

“Then you’re stuck here.  You prick.”  Her face hardened to flint.  

He hadn’t meant for the romance to grow. The stolen weekends in the tiny cottage; sleepy churches piercing the sky;  the intoxicating smell of hedgerows and soil and the sharp brackish exclamation of Amanda’s scent on his fingers; he felt scrubbed clean.  

“I want to drink you,” he’d told her.

Amanda enveloped and supported him, so different from angular Janet with her sharp-edged cleverness; the sarcastic children.  Floating in the darkness of Amanda’s low ceiling room, in the silence of the village, he had felt overwhelmed with love for the first time in years.  “You’ve swept me away,” he’d say.

Now the water eroded all of it from beneath his feet.

Both stood in silence, trapped as the water continued to rise.

Alexander felt himself struggle for breath.