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receded, so that they looked a little like hollow sides or empty bellies. And then the library was flooded to a depth of three shelves, creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal system. The losses in hooked and braided rugs and needlepoint footstools will never be reckoned. Fungus and mold crept into wedding dresses and photograph albums, so that the leather crumbled in our hands when we lifted the covers, and the sharp smell that rose when we opened them was asinsinuating as the smells one finds under a plank or a rock. Much of what Fingerbone had hoarded up was defaced or destroyed outright, but perhaps because the hoard was not much to begin with, the loss was not overwhelming.
    The next day was very fine. The water was so calm that the sunken half of the fallen tree was replaced by the mirrored image of the half trunk and limbs that remained above the water. All day two cats prowled in the branches, pawing at little eddies and currents. The water was beginning to slide away. We could hear the lake groan under the weight of it, for the lake had not yet thawed. The ice would still be thick, but it would be the color of paraffin, with big white bubbles under it. In normal weather there would have been perhaps an inch of water on top of it in shallow places. Under all the weight of the flood water it sagged and, being fibrous rather than soft or brittle, wrenched apart, as resistant to breaching as green bones. The afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake, and the sun shone on, and the flood was the almost flawless mirror of a cloudless sky, fat with brimming and very calm.
    Lucille and I pulled on our boots and went downstairs. The parlor was full of light. Our walking from the stairs to the door had set off an intricate system of small currents which rolled against the floorboards. Glyphs of crimped and plaited light swung across the walls and the ceiling. The couch and the armchairs were oddly dark. The stuffing in their backs had slid, and the cushions had shallow craters in the middles of them. Water seeped out when we touched them. In the course of days the flood had made a sort of tea of hemp and horsehair andrag paper in that room, a smell which always afterward clung to it and which I remember precisely at this minute, though I have never encountered its like.
    Sylvie came down the hall in a pair of my grandmother’s boots and looked in at us from the door. “Should we start dinner?” she asked.
    Lucille poked a sofa cushion with her finger. “Look,” she said. When she took her hand away, the suppurated water vanished, but the dent remained.
    “It’s a shame,” Sylvie said. From the lake came the increasingly terrific sound of wrenching and ramming and slamming and upending, as a south-flowing current heaped huge shards of ice against the north side of the bridge. Sylvie pushed at the water with the side of her foot. A ribbed circle spread to the four walls and the curves of its four sides rebounded, interpenetrating, and the orderly ranks of light swept and swung about the room. Lucille stomped with her feet until the water sloshed against the walls like water carried in a bucket. There were the sounds of dull concussion from the kitchen, and the lace curtains, drawn thin and taut by their own sodden weight, shifted and turned. Sylvie took me by the hands and pulled me after her through six grand waltz steps. The house flowed around us. Lucille pulled the front door open and the displacement she caused made one end of the woodpile in the porch collapse and tipped a chair, spilling a bag of clothespins. Lucille stood at the door, looking out.
    “It sounds like the bridge is breaking up,” she remarked.
    “That’s probably just the ice,” Sylvie said.
    Lucille said, “I don’t think Simmons’s house is where it used to be.”
    Sylvie went to the door and peered down the street at a blackened roof. “It’s so hard to tell.”
    “Those bushes used to be on the other side.”
    “Maybe the