With the little boy gone, it was just me and the stranger sharing the boat. The only thing he’d ever said was thank you once when he first stepped on. He didn’t move or anything, he just sat there in the back of the boat staring at me as I pulled the oars again and again. His raincoat was still wet. I wondered if he was a murderer.

We passed the roof of an old farmhouse, with a mangy yellow dog sitting right on top with his spotted tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth. His claws were sunk into the wet shingles off the roof. His head turned to follow us as we floated by.

The rain had stopped but the sky was still colorless. The flood water was chalky and opaque, revealing nothing of the things it had swallowed up.

“Nothing is consumed, it is merely redistributed,” said the stranger, as if correcting me. I stopped rowing and looked at him. “Slowly the water will recede, and a woman in Natchez will find the family portrait of a sharecropper from Woodville twisted into her laundry line. An old man from Mound Bayou will wonder what happened to his tin drinking cup, not knowing it is nestled where the water left it, on a windowsill in Clarksdale.”

“What about things that are water soluble,” I asked.

The stranger was silent except for the sound he made crossing his arms. “The good lord will provide for that which is water soluble.”

The oars knocked against the side of the boat.

“I’m from Clarksdale,” I admitted.

The stranger leaped forward, throwing back the hood of the raincoat that had covered his face. I saw that he was an old man. “I know that,” he said, menacingly, “and I believe you have something that doesn’t belong to you! A tin cup! My tin cup!”

So we fought.