Some years the river remembers the old stories about covering the bottoms. This year it decided to practice.
The caboose came out on a gravel road that was already a creek. Porch furniture floated with the dignity of people who had paid for it. In the loft of a barn that still had one dry corner: a goat, a goose, and a barn dog who had appointed himself committee.
The trucks could not take the last fifty yards. Dolly brought Duckster out of the side bay as if she were taking a skillet off a hook. The little rig does not look like a rescue. It looks like a joke the farm told once and then oiled. Jokes that have been oiled will carry a goose.
Charlotte swam the last of it because collies will, and because the dog in the loft needed to see another dog arrive first. Authority is a smell. After that the committee voted to board.
Duckster goes first when the world has narrowed. The caboose holds whatever the world still owes a dry floor.
Home was the farm spur in ordinary August light, which felt like a luxury the future had misplaced. The goat, the goose, and the dog slept in the long aisle until morning. Language came later, on the porch, with the rest of the talking farm listening the way a choir listens to a new alto — polite, and already making room.