Beneath the rain she can hear the hiss of what she feared would come. It grows in volume until it roars above the rain. The flood surges through the valley like a wall, illuminated only in glimmers by seams of lightning that stitch the sky. Agnes rocks in the swing. Thousands of downed trees surf the flood, cracking against each other violently.
Agnes takes one last breath and holds it deep within. The waters overtake the cabin. The porch buckles and the house is sent into a fatal lean. Then it is gone. The valley disappears in an instant. The river fills it as if it has always been there. The mountains become distant tiny islands on this new sea. The waters rise so high that the lightning skips across the surface. The moon goes out.
Agnes wakes from this dream. It is the last one.
She releases the breath she has been holding.
Eleanor is here.
It is so very hard to leave behind all of these words when you’re turning your years and years of manuscript into a graphic novel. As much as I like today’s page — that collapsing cabin is particularly pleasing — it still doesn’t do justice to that passage above. I remember writing this section of the book rapidly (one of the rare times that writing came easily) during a week in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I remember that nearly euphoric moment when I realized that Agnes’s dream space was expanding like a universe while Agnes herself expanded to contain Eleanor… and that when Eleanor arrived, so would the destruction of Agnes’s fortress of solitude.
The thing Agnes doesn’t take a moment to wonder — but the thing I found myself wondering — is: will she ever see this valley again?
I think she might.
But maybe not alone.