“They’s gone” Jacob was whispering in my ear. It was morning and I was sleeping on the couch since I ain’t want to sleep in the same room as Jacob last night since he was the worst, and I told him so. Secretly, I wanted to catch Momma and Daddy leaving early so I could talk them into letting me come along and to leave Jacob behind. But I guess they done sneaked out on me and now Jacob and Me is all left alone.

I get up and check outside just to make sure the truck still ain’t there, but it’s gone and it’s still raining as hard as ever and the corn is bent with the wet. Since we ain’t sure how long Momma and Daddy is going to be gone for, we both sigh and get going with our chores since they have been known to forget something and come hauling back, which sometimes catches us unawares and gets us in trouble. We tidy a little around the house but mainly just stack things up so they look cleaner. Jacob gets to chopping wood outside and I head out too and stack it like we is supposed to until we graduate.

Jacob is cutting corners and not chopping the wood small enough to fit in the wood stove, but I ain’t care none since that ain’t none of my affair and he can get into trouble if he wants to. My job is just to stack and that’s what I’m doing. Steam is rising off our wet clothes and Jacob holds out his arm and it’s steaming real good and he says, “my arm has the power! I can light pretty much anything on fire with this here arm!” I hold out my hand too and they’s steam coming off my fingers and I feel magic and this ain’t so bad after all. We finish up pretty quick and get on inside out of the rain and we is both bored already.

I say maybe we can go through some book or another and put another picture on the T.V. and watch it but Jacob says he ain’t staring at a picture for all day and he wants to get outside and go exploring. We think about all the best places to explore, but we already done seen them and they was only good when it wasn’t so wet, and you can’t lay in a field looking at the sky when everything is covered in water and that sounds like a good way to get a chill, and I ain’t want no chill. Then Jacob gets a look in his eye. “Hey!” he says “With all this rain we got, I bet that river is about as high as she’ll ever go! Bet she’s rushing and throwing everything down stream and maybe we can watch a giant tree float down it and get all smashed up or something!” Jacob has been terrible lately, but I must admit that this is about as good an idea as he’s ever had. I hop up and we is all excited, for we want to see that river pushing everything down it.

We set out real quick and it ain’t too far. Even from the house we can hear its rushing and I’m amazed we ain’t heard it when we was out before. Maybe we was just used to the sound being there and it was faded into the background. We hustle through the trees and it ain’t too slippery although we still have to walk careful so we don’t fall on a pile of sharp sticks and maybe get impaled and that won’t end up too well since we is all alone right now. Pretty soon we reach the river and it’s high up alright.

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High enough to touch the trunks of the cottonwood trees that line the banks.

It was rushing so fast that when I toss a stick in the middle, I counted only to five before the stick disappeared around the first bend in the river and it usually takes at least a count of ten and that means she was going double speed, and I’m proud of knowing this fact on my own without no one having to point it out. We commence to walking along the banks of the river and Jacob says “hey!”

I look and Jacob has a brown bottle which we immediately get to playing with, filling it with silt, and leaves, and pretending it was a magic potion sometimes, and other times holding it under the water to try to catch little fish or tadpoles or the like although they ain’t around like they usually are, seeing as how they probably got washed away with the brown rushing water. After we run out of ideas for the bottle, Jacob says that we should break it with a rock which makes me scared because I know only adults are supposed to have broken glass. Daddy says “it’ll kill you flat if you touch it wrong” and I start to cry because Jacob is going to break it anyway and we’re going to get in trouble and possibly die and he says “fine you big baby, I won’t break it” and I feel relief as Jacob tosses the bottle in the river to float away fast, and that gives me an idea and I say maybe we should make boats. Jacob says we should make boats. We commence to making boats.

Mine is a little lopsided as it’s made of a round hunk of wood and don’t stay upright too well and rolls around like a fat hog.

Jacob made his boat out of an old board that he found in the woods nearby with a little barbed wire tacked to it, and we float them on the edge of the river and they float pretty well. Even though we is getting rained on, I’m very happy in this moment. My boat picks up a little breeze from the leaf I stuck in it and it gets just out of my grasp and into the deeper white water, and this makes me sad.

Jacob sees that I’m sad so he takes his shoes off quick and starts to wade in after it for me, saying how big of a baby I am even though I know he ain’t really mean it. The river is rushing hard, and the rain washes out all the roads sometimes and the stick I put in earlier went around the corner in five seconds and not ten seconds. Five seconds and not ten, which means it’s moving double fast. Jacob is sliding into the water after my boat and the river is coasting along in a soupy torrent, and sticks and logs is traveling down it fast like a freeway. He reaches for the boat and has his fingers on it and he’s going to bring it out to me, bring it on in so we can keep playing with the boats.

He grabs it up and smiles like he done the best thing in the world and I guess he did, but he loses his footing and splashes into the water and the boat goes under and he goes under with the boat and out of sight and I think he’s pretendin’, to make me laugh.

Jacob is staying under the water as a joke I guess, and I watch and my smile goes away and I know something is wrong and I stand up straight and run back and forth along the bank to catch sight of him. Oh Jacob stop pretendin’, I don’t need that boat back nohow and come back out now so we can go back to being adventurers and I don’t see him. And I don’t see him. And I don’t see him.