Work Text:
Water 7, built seven times, breathes, anchored and shuddering, with the tides.
There is an inflow to her, and an outflow: her mouths are many; she swallows shipwrecks and whales, spits up children’s toys, rusted-over bolts, sailcloth and scales. Water 7 balances, unstable, on a foundation of bones.
It’s two hours after noon. Just beneath the shingles and chimneys of her skin, under floorboards carpeted in imported color, carpenters nail wood to rotting wood, reinforcing a floor that won’t survive the next flood above a basement already flooded above a basement already flooded above a basement already flooded. Next-door, they build upward, shingle-skin surgically removed, beams hammered in as splints to demarcate the ghosts of walls-to-be which in the next storm will crack under the wind, bending bending bending bending bending bending bending until they snap! with a noise like a gunshot, or like the end of the world.
This, then, is Water 7, the city built seven times and in that seven times an infinity more.
Atop her highest point she wears a fountain as a crown; water bleeds from it, catching the sunlight as momentary, transient prisms, falling as silks as blood through veins, through canals bricked into being by generations of hands, leaking shuddering drowning, breathing. She wasn’t, and isn’t, and won’t be, and seven-times is.
It’s two hundred years ago. Water 7, built four times, is hammered into shape a fifth, a process more akin to reconstructive surgery than carpentry. For her bones they salvage wood, tree-trunk masts and splinters sawed and treated and varnished and set as pillars and as stilts; for her skin they pull canvas from her hidden stomachs, stopgaps made permanent until! the next storm or the next storm or the next storm tears away nails and rips up painted sailcloth roofs like sheaves of hair; for her voice the gurgling entropic hiss of the tides.
A futile flag raised against the passage of time is Water 7, the city built seven times and every year destroyed again to be rebuilt seven more.
It’s two months hence. Water 7 glitters in the sun, morning mist rising from her canal-veins and shingle-skin, carpenters unboarding doors and scraping algae from under her nails, recovering, recovering, rebuilding, rebuilding rebuilding rebuilding, rebuilding. Merchants throw open their windows, open their doors, lay out their displays, masks and maps and charms, all their little jewels of personal survival; travelers step aboard gondole, climb steps, breath and blood in motion; beyond her, reaching outward in iron spider-thread lines, a fragile thrumming string of rails floats untouched, maintained diligently by ghosts.
There’s a future where the carpenters pull up her roots, take a hacksaw to her anchor-chain and send her floating free. They speak of it, do the people who live in the grooves of her skin, murmuring about storm surges and necessity, about hope. Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. Maybe the next storm will kill her after all, slice her open snap! her brittle bones drown her in salt and blood. Maybe she’ll go on breathing anyway.
Water 7, built seven times, dreams the shape of the eighth.