(July 10, 2025) the world is barely visible. with each impact my footsteps leave quick, percussive, liquid craters wide enough i could fit folding chairs in their circumference. im sinking into inch high grass. the van door takes 60 seconds to open. i dive in.

we pull up at the church to pull my youngest brother outta "vacation" "bible school". his wheelchair pulls up under multiple umbrellas, and i pull him in with me. the severe flash flood alert pulled itself up while dad ran around doing some bullshit. the lord watches over all our comings and goings, mom says. the vbs people gave my little brother a popsicle. the snacks they give him each day have been getting progressively less healthy: at first it was veggies, tomorrow it's s'mores.

we're driving halfway across the county to pick up my other younger brothers from youth group. i always was interested in how people with such varying amounts of wealth could be packed together in such a small amount of land like this, gargoyle mansions a reasonable drive from notoriously violent streets, the full spectrum in between.

the world is barely visible. cars make motorboat trails splashing well above them. mom yells at dad not to turn into an obviously swamped patch of road. people are coming out in this weather to visit that boxlike neon smoke shop we pass on the way to our church. mom rhapsodises about addiction. the building quality keeps going down like we're adjusting a settings slider. dad hits the breaks too hard whenever the world stops being visible.

my younger brothers hop in outta nowhere. the older one stands outside in the torrent for a second 60 seconds to avoid getting in the back with the younger one. they didn't learn anything new from youth group. they were church-going kids, the leader had said, and this was more for the other kids there, the ones from the worst of the worst areas, the ones who didn't know what "jerusalem" was, famously the most important thing in the bible.

my mom briefly wanted us to stop at a nearby wendy's, but it was flooded.