My window overlooks the bullrushes of a river bank. Fed by upstream rains, the river rises, and spills out of its channel, and surges up against the pane of my window. I sleep on in dreamy ignorance, even when the water breaks through and lifts my bed and carries me off, under the cries of the landlady, on the cresting tide. I float downstream on my mattress raft, snoring. The wreckage of calamities swirls around me.
Cows spin ponderously in the water and bellow in slow panic.
A clinging family shouts down from the perch of a roof. A great fallen tree trunk, a behemoth, jolts and shudders against the piling of a bridge. I sail under the stone arch, my fist under my pillow clutching wallet and documents, in the night grip of a voyager. A turbulent moon rises in the dark sky and bathes my headway in a lurid gloss. At some point, I awaken in the bedclothes.