Praying for Sleep

from his hands and trickle to their feet.
    He kisses each of her eyes and she takes this as the sign that he wants her to open them. They gaze at each other for a moment and she sees that, no, not all the petals have fallen. One remains. He holds it between them, a bright-red oval from a John Armstrong plant. He opens his mouth and places it on his tongue, like a priest dispensing host. She desperately works the nightgown over her hips and reaches for him, enveloping him in her arms, sliding her hands into the small of his back. He leans forward. Their tongues connect and as she pulls him down on top of her, they transfer the red petal back and forth until it disintegrates and they swallow the fragments as they swallow each other.
    Lis Atcheson remained lost for a moment in this memory then opened her eyes and gazed out over the flowers in the greenhouse, listening to the pleasant hiss of spray from the watering system.
    “Oh, Owen,” she whispered. “Owen . . .”
    She set down her packed suitcase and strolled through the damp, fragrant room, then out the lath-house door to the flagstone patio. She looked out over the lake.
    The black water lapped persistently.
    Troubled, she noticed that the level of the lake had risen another several inches in the last twenty minutes. She glanced to her left, toward a low-lying portion of the property—the dip in the yard behind the garage, where Owen had stacked the extra bags. A creek trickled into the lake there and the marshy shoreline was obscured with rushes. She couldn’t see how well the barrier was holding but she didn’t particularly want to walk down the narrow, slippery path to find out. Owen was a meticulous—often fanatic—worker and she guessed that he’d built a solid levee. Her own engineering efforts, in the center of the yard, looked shoddy. The water was almost up to the level of the bags she’d dozed upon after she and Owen had made love; it was only eighteen inches beneath the top row.
    She walked closer to the lake. Above her, no stars. She couldn’t even discern the underside of the clouds; the sky was flat and smooth, a gray-blue monotone, like the flesh of a shark. Were the clouds moving or not? Were they a hundred feet in the air, or ten thousand? She couldn’t tell.
    Vague motion, nearby, startled her. The shell of the large tortoise jerked again as the ungainly creature lumbered toward the lake. Fiercely intent on its goal, the animal scuttled over rocks and roots too high for its reptilian feet, slipping often. Why the urgency? Lis wondered. Was some eerie premonition about the storm prompting the thing to seek the safety of the lake? But what would a tortoise have to fear from the rain? With a loud splash the animal caromed off a willow root and sliced into the water. There, it became a perfect airfoil and cruised eloquently just beneath the surface for a short distance then dove out of sight. Lis watched its wake vanish and the water turn once again to rippling black silk.
    She strolled back toward the house, through wide, trellis-covered patches of overturned dirt—her formal garden. She paused before the one rosebush that still retained a number of petals. When she was young, Lis had plotted to dye her hair the copper color of a plant this shade—an Arizona grandiflora—and paid for it with a whipping when her father, in one of his Saturday-morning raids on the girls’ room, discovered the Clairol, hidden beneath her mattress.
    She clicked a brittle thorn with her nail then lifted away a few dead petals. She rubbed them against her cheek.
    The horizon in the west flared brilliantly with a broad gray-green flash. It had vanished by the time her eyes flicked to that portion of the sky.
    The petals fell from Lis’s hands.
    She heard the kitchen door opening then closing. “I’m ready,” Portia called. “You have your suitcase?”
    Lis walked to the house. Gazing at the yellow windows she said, “Listen, I have to tell you—I’ve changed my mind.”
    “You what?”
    Lis set her suitcase inside the kitchen door. “I’m going to finish the sandbagging. Taping the greenhouse. It could take an hour or so. I’d really like you to stay too but if you want to leave, I understand. I’ll call you a cab.”
     
    Emil was sorely tempted by the aroma of grilling burgers and onions but he knew his job and kept his butt planted on the ground.
    Trenton Heck himself cast a longing eye toward the truck-stop diner but at the moment the