Flood Is Water

LATOYA and I have just a few days left in New Orleans before we are to return home to our lives, to our work. We’re here for our annual writing retreat, time we take together each year to work on our novels. We’ve been to Taos, Tuscany, and Saratoga Springs, and this year we decided on New Orleans. It’s a pact we’ve made as best friends: two weeks, anywhere we want, every year, no exceptions, until our novels are finished. Our writer friend picks us up and brings us across the bridge, into the Lower Ninth Ward, where Hurricane Katrina’s damage did the most harm to poor black people, where many homes are still abandoned, twelve years later. It’s raining hard this evening. I feel a dread rise in my chest and settle over me. I fear water because I cannot swim. Yet here we are, in the Gulf, driving past Fats Domino’s house on a rainy evening, taking photographs, being inside and outside of this city at the same time. Our friend, Maurice,