There was no up.
That was the first thing the river taught me, and it taught it hard. I'd spent my whole life with a reliable sense of which way the sky was, and the flood took it away in the first second and never gave it back.
There was only the water, black and total and colder than anything has a right to be, turning me end over end in a dark so complete my open eyes and shut eyes showed me the same nothing.
I did the stupid thing first. I fought it.
I clawed for a surface I couldn't find, kicked against a current that outweighed me by the size of a mountain, spent strength I did not have on the oldest instinct there is, and the river let me tire myself out the way an adult lets a furious child swing at its knees.
