Until The Stars Go From His Eyes - story snippet

Raymond Baskins had been afraid of water his entire life; deathly, paralytically afraid. It therefore came as a complete surprise that, in the summer of 1915, he fell in love with a mermaid.

Most people—people with a healthy respect for their own mortality—were cautious around water. Most blanched at the powerful heave of an ocean tide, and most quailed at the rush of a river swollen with flood. He was no different. But even a heavy rain in springtime would set his teeth on edge and see him sat up in bed in the small hours, listening, waiting for a breach, a leak, a drip that meant the water had gotten IN.

He imagined he could feel each drop of water that hammered onto the roof of his Brooklyn apartment, that battered against the windows like it was trying to break the glass, that rushed down the drainpipes to spill into the grates below, until rivers of water ran in the streets and the sewers and subways overflowed.

Not long after the storm of 1910, he'd spent a large sum money making his home completely watertight. He earned thirty dollars a week from his employment at Masterson, Dexter, & Hobbes Chartered Accountants, which was pretty decent, and he had no children or spouse to care for. His parents were long in the ground. He had no siblings. A cat, Philomena, ate modestly and required only an open window at the fire escape during summer and a soft bed, or convenient lap, near the hearth during winter.

Raymond was in his apartment the day of the storm. At 3pm the sky had darkened so completely the streetlights came on and he could see his reflection in the study window. It shuddered and shivered as the wind and the rain battered and gusted against the glass. Horrified, he waited for the windows to crack and break and let the storm inside. Philomena leapt up onto the sill and he snatched her away, cradling her, protesting, to his jacket.

The tropical storm was short-lived. Over in less than ten minutes, leaving a path of destruction like a hurricane. The images and accounts from the papers the next day, told of a deceptively clement summer day in June that turned on the city's occupants without warning. In Upper Manhattan, it took only minutes for the subway tunnels to flood as water ran down to the tracks from entrances and sewers. A photograph showed water lapping halfway up stairs of the street entrances, their subways entirely filled.

Trolley cars ceased to run as their routes became lakes and their passengers fled to higher ground. Fishing and pleasure boats in Jamaica Bay foundered, their occupants dragged down by the weight of their clothes or slapped away from their capsized vessels by the fury of the storm. Many died.

Shaken and feeling unsafe in his own home, Raymond arranged to replace all his windows with insulating glass—good solid glass—and sturdier frames. It was an incredibly expensive endeavour and, when it was completed, he felt like a captain on the bridge of his own vessel; looking over his domain but protected from the elements.

The windows never shuddered again.