“Mount Kisco” by Shannon Cain (Fiction ’05)

Mount Kisco

When the Croton Dam burst during the Hudson Valley Inundation of 1974, the floodwaters swept away bridges and homes and highways all the way down to Manhattan. A little 19th century cemetery in the woods behind our house let loose its coffins. They rose from the oversoaked loam, were swept along the incline on which I’d chipped my front tooth in a toboggan incident the winter before, and came to a rest in an eddy, caught by our swingset. Outside our kitchen window we found a floating jumble of corpses in tattered old-timey formal dress. Tangled in the remains of their fancy hardwood caskets, the skeletons swirled, bony limbs and hairy skulls bobbing in the murky water.

Over the following days the water just kept rising, swallowing our station wagon in the driveway and coming to a lapping rest against the stones of our front porch. Dark little waves from the grotesquely swollen reservoir licked at the rock foundation under my bedroom window, fueling my nightmares of entire populations meeting their deaths by drowning.