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No Kill
Flash Fiction by Utahna Faith

Sabadi hides with yellow eyes behind the Red Cross tent. One tent one day, different tent another. He hears them ask me, do you need diapers? No, I say, thanking goodness for at least this small miracle, and I know Sabadi wants to knock me up. Wants to knock us all up. They ask if I need water, and how much, and I always say as much as they can spare and they put a flat of small bottles in the back seat or maybe some days it is one large jug. They ask if I need cleaner and I ask if it is non-phosphate and explain that the Preservation Resource people told me that phosphates feed the mold. Of course they do. Feed the algae, feed the mold. The environmentalists were right. So were the survivalists, though. I still won't buy a gun. I don't want to kill anyone. I might consider killing Sabadi, when his constant, cheap-chartreuse gaze becomes too much. He slips from the first-aid tent and lurks behind the small stack of ice chests. Every day I hope for an ice chest, but they always run out before I reach the front of the line. They are such a calming blue, the same color as the FEMA tarps, and the air is filled with dust and spores. Today the last one goes to a couple three spots in front of me, who are on foot. They fill it with diapers and phosphate-containing cleaner and each grab a handle. I think Sabadi is in the cooler now, going with them, but of course he is not. He slips into the last box of flu shot serum. I fear he is no kill.

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Moments of Light
by Blaise Allen, Ph.D.

For six days after Hurricane Wilma
we go without things we deem
necessary to survive: electric,
a/c, hot showers, computers,
cell phones, and the ability
to travel and work. At night,
neighbors gather in driveways. We star
gaze. Pull out lawn chairs, share
candles, food, water, grills, money, and bread.
We talk to each other about water lines,
ice lines, the tree in the pool.
We list what we miss most, chat about
what we take for granted, and
the first thing we will do
when it gets back to normal.

Pillowed in darkness, we listen
to local news on talk radio.
Suddenly, houselights flicker.
All the neighbors cheer! We run
out into streets, congratulate
each other, celebrate our good fortune
with fireworks! People
bang pots out front doors
like it's New Years eve. Smiles glow
under street lights. We beam
bright as porch lights on homes
that once again confine us with all their power.
People say, they can't wait to get cable,
watch television, get on-line. We are thrilled
to get back the very thing that separates us:
a force that locks us in our own alarmed
worlds and prevents us from basking
in each other's goodness
and momentary light.

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The Other Neighborhoods
by Josh Spilker

The mounds of trash stand six feet high at the grocery store. The 100 year old ice cream store is vacant, along with the ten month old restaurant across the street. There are the tent cities, and the cranes, and the yard signs for removal of this, removal of that, removal of everything. It all has to be removed.

But the well-heeled Garden District seems pristine, and the French Quarter busy as ever. Yes, their foundations shaken, but their resolve great. But they have the least to overcome, the least to rebuild, the least to replace. In their streets, in their neighborhoods, you can block out the wasteland that surrounds the rest. People jog the paths, and walk their dogs, and even eat at some of the same restaurants. Hopefully it's not all just an inconvenience – their trash may be late, but it will get picked up. It did before, it will now. Better off before, and still the same.

The other neighborhoods are silent, except for the chainsaw buzzing, and the hammers rapping. There is silence, but their spite is palpable to their more affluent neighbors. The rich just keep getting richer. It is the silent majority – there is death everywhere. Homes not just gutted, but impaled, so nothing is left but for entrails of furniture, appliances, and walls to be spilled into the street. The garbage is six feet high, and it won't move for months.

In these death rows, the light brown icing of dirt cakes everything. Silt from a lake bottom, because that's where these rows were – at the bottom. And when the moisture met the humidity, blossoms of mold sprouted – bringing their stench and cough to any who came by.

And who will come by? Maybe just the tourist contractors who bring their sledge hammers, and bulldozers to rebuild a city they didn't know before, and certainly won't want to know now. They'll make it new, and leave it alone – just like they did before.

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Monkey Hill
by Nettie McDaniel

Throughout Katrina I thought of Monkey Hill
in Audubon Zoo. It's said to have
an elevation of twenty-eight feet
in a city well below sea level.
As people took refuge in attics, on roofs,
one landmark building after another flooded,
I kept my ears perked for some mention
of the highest point in the city of New Orleans,
Monkey Hill. The surging water breached
levies, drove policemen to point their guns
at their own heads, and I bawled for the damned
baboons on Monkey Hill, for the sun bear,
the baby buffalo, the orangutan
preemies, the cheetah, and the bald eagle.
While buildings burned, power failed, the frail were left,
I sat possessed by the news on the internet,
The Times Picayune and CNN.
In 1928 the Audubon Zoo
had built the hill from a landfill on the swells
of the river bank. It was also a graveyard.
Ashes were hauled, back then, from uptown
incinerators, along with discarded
washing machines and refrigerators.
When Katrina's winds topped one hundred,
the city fell-in confusion, helpless.
As nine hundred seventy-three people died,
I searched everywhere for news of Monkey
Hill, for word of the animals in the city —
the African wild dog, the white rhino.

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A Crabber Wakes to the Morning of His Seventieth Birthday
by Louis E. Bourgeois

Since he had turned sixty,
he'd thought that every time he woke up
it would be for the last time.
This morning was no different,
except that he had turned seventy,
and with this, a darkening sense of the world,
there being no one else around to tell him otherwise.
He woke to the stale and horrible air
that is August in Southeast Louisiana,
where he'd been born, raised, and forgotten.
He'd moved to Bataria Bay when he was young,
where the fishing is well regulated, but good.
He'd married there and had raised a son,
he'd even gone to church for a while, he'd gone a few times,
until the hurricane of '48 came,
and smashed a young man's dream into pieces,
leaving the crabber to face 15,000 days
of life and nature alone.
The bayous, the lagoons, the channels, the gulfs, the lakes.
all took a part of him each day,
at least as much as he took from them each day.
Maybe, they took from each other equally.
But the old crabber didn't see it that way at all.
Depressed for thirty years, he lived each day
in complete awe that one could go so long
unnoticed, unloved, irreparably alone.
He could have gotten another wife, but he didn't.
But could he make any human connection after '48?
After losing wife, home, and child in an instant?
With no one to counsel him,
the whole fishing village wiped out,
and he and a few lonesome others
left only for animal survival.
And does it matter much in the end,
if one chooses one's life or it is chosen for him.
The old crabber didn't think in this way,
he only knew what he saw
and the pain that went with all that he saw.
Like a sunken trap full of number one market crabs,
that are just deep enough to be irretrievable,
or, like the water spouts that come once again,
and sink his boat, once again,
leaving him on the muddy shore of the marsh,
without recourse to anything but his own naked body,
that can barely make the seven mile swim home.
Or, it's another hurricane that destroys
his childhood home on Bayou Sauvage,
on the Chef Menteur, where Betsy in '67
hovered over Lake Pontchartrain for a day,
destroying everything around it for sixty miles.
Or, it's Andrew in '92 that did in the little
wooden shack he'd been living in for twenty-three years.
After Andrew, all that's left are the pieces of the shack,
and other debris that had flown or drifted in.
In a couple of days, he puts together a little tin shack,
and paddles out to his traps to see what's left.
He had four-hundred traps,
it took him a week to run that many.
After the hurricane had destroyed his shack,
and just about all that was left of his soul,
and most of the four hundred traps that had taken him twenty-five
years to accumulate by begging, borrowing, and stealing,
mostly by begging, often by stealing, hardly ever by buying,
the crabber hardly knew what money felt like anymore,
he was reduced to about fifty some odd traps,
most of them damaged in some way,
and he'd have a time of it to fix those
the rips so wide in some that he'd have to use
them to fix the less damaged ones.
'92 was the death year, he thought, and he also thought
it'd be just about the perfect year to die anyway.
How absurd for this old crabber
to go on living in the way he was living,
essentially living for nothing,
and with nothing to show for it in any case.
How absurd, and with the twenty-first century
enwrapping him in its spiked net.
'92 should have taken me, he thought.
But it didn't take him, and after seven years, the old crabber
managed to put together about two hundred traps.
When the season was good, he even
managed to make a little money,
enough to keep him in clothes and cigarettes
and even enough to buy some used traps now and then.
And he didn't mind the tin shack so much,
except for those few days on Bayou Sauvage
when it got real cold and the wind
tried to tear down the metal walls.
He wakes up one day and it's August 9, 2000,
and he's seventy years old.
How is it possible for a man to live
so long in pain, he thinks.
Is it possible that pain is its own redemption?
Ever since the year 2000 had arrived,
he had brought in the new year with
a hand-sized green a.m. radio,
it was the only electric device he had,
he didn't have electricity in the tin shack,
but since the year 2000 had arrived,
he'd felt depleted put of place, downright silly even.
He believed in the Apocalypse, but wasn't sure why,
because he hadn't been truly religious since he was a boy.
He thought the world might end any day now,
but he didn't see any signs of it.
Often when he thought long and hard about the end of the world,
his thoughts would be followed by the practical items of his trade:
the hampers, the yellow knotted rope,
the orange cork, the small and large mesh wire,
the cord wrapped knife,
the clambers and thick gloves he never used.
He would think about marsh grass, "seaweed,"
and about how the marsh was eroding
and becoming Lake Borgne each day.
He thought that he too was becoming Lake Borgne
and like the marsh that had kept him alive,
and that had destroyed him,
he too would be joining the sea
where the largest crabs migrate and die.

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