The Dry Year

Flash · after a painting by Ira Robinson

They drowned the village the year my grandfather turned twelve. He never said a word about it after — not the night the engineers came with their forms and their good shoes, not once in fifty years. He just stopped looking at water.

In the dry years the church comes back. The reservoir drops and the tower stands up out of the mud, and if you go down on the rope with a lamp you can reach the chapel before the level turns.

The Mare de Déu is still there. The gold leaf has curdled to the orange of iodine dried on a wound. The green has eaten everything that wasn’t her face. The water keeps her face.

Someone took her eyes before they let the river in. Two clean sockets, the wood beneath them paler than the rest — the way a finger is paler under a ring worn forty years.

My grandfather kept a tin in the dresser he never opened. I opened it the week he died.

Two eyes. Glass. Brown. Still looking.

I went down on the rope. I put them back. I never told anyone.

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Thank you, Original Worlds (Ira Robinson) — the green did half the work and the face was a confession before I wrote a word; I just took dictation. A real pleasure to write into this one. Original painting by Ira Robinson, credited and well worth it.

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