the boy in the sewer

In the late afternoons of July, when the storms roll in each night at 5 o’clock, greeting the

sun as she starts her descent below the trees, the creek at the bottom of my hill bursts from its

banks. It swells from a calm trickle to a roaring flood, tearing bridges from their anchors and

sweeping streetlights from the trail. The sirens blare from our phones, the flash flood warnings stark

and bright against the darkened, thundering sky, but by then the soft current has turned into a

rapids. As children, we were always told to stay away from the creek. Our mothers would hold us

back on hot summer days, never letting us splash through the water. When we got older, stronger,

taller, and their arms could no longer cage us, they told us the story of a boy. He’d only been about

fifty feet inside the sewer tunnels and eleven years old when the rain started, but by the time it was

loud enough to hear, it was too late. The sky had opened, as it always does, and the water had

flooded the river, and the river had flooded the tunnels. We were told they’d never found his body.

They said they didn’t know his name.

Looking back, it’s rather obvious that we wouldn’t find anything in the tunnels, but I was a

little girl who lived a great deal of her life sandwiched between the pages of books, soaring through

the sky on the scaled backs of dragons and battling back against whichever villain was trying to

destroy the worlds that held me so closely between their margins. I was an adventurer with parents

who maybe trusted me a bit too much, not realizing that their daughter ran off into the woods

around the creek to meet with the fairies that lived in her head and somehow avoid the shadowed

men who were all too real. Of course I would drag my friends to the mouth of the sewer on a day so

humid it felt as though the air was trying to get under your skin and burrow next to your bones. Of

course we’d look for the body. If there’d been anything to find, it’d have been unidentifiable, and we

would’ve been scarred by the sight of flesh falling off bones, the sound of flies buzzing around it

and worms crawling through it, the smell of death long since passed. I suppose it’s good then, that

the body never existed at all. But the part of me that craved the knowing, the holding and sharing of

the facts, was hungry. I thought I’d stepped out of the storm drain empty-handed, but the darkness

I’d been hunting for had been lurking around the edges, and it followed me out and into the twilight.

In the years that followed, I’d grab my questions by the throat and wring the knowledge out

of the world around me to solve them. How could I tell the kinds of stories I ran away into? Why

was it harder to want an adventure than to have one? Why was it so much easier for the people

around me to make friends? When did the men on the street corner start to look at me in a way that

made my skin crawl? Why did I go to the store the next day and choose my rings based on which

could cut the deepest when thrown in a punch? What drove me to swallow the extra pill the first

time? The second? Who did I hope would save me when I swallowed the handful?

Why did parents scare their children with the story of a waterlogged corpse?

There isn’t a perfect answer to most of these questions. Some have too many, others none at

all. It won’t make me stop looking. It never has.