One afternoon, after a storm that split a pine in her backyard, she found a wooden box wedged between two rocks. Inside: a dried flower, a pocketknife, a strip of cloth embroidered with the name Rita in faded thread. Not her name. Someone else’s Rita. Some other Rita who had lost things to the same indifferent water.
She made coffee. She opened her notebook to a fresh page. rita lo que el agua se llevó
That night, Rita dreamed of a flood that rose without sound. She stood at her window and watched her furniture float past: the blue armchair, the kitchen table, the bed where she’d once slept beside a man who now lived three states away. She didn’t try to save anything. When she woke, the river was still there, low and dark and humming a tune she almost recognized. One afternoon, after a storm that split a
But Rita kept lists.
The first time the river rose, Rita was seven. She watched from the porch as the brown current swallowed her mother’s rose bushes, then the tire swing, then the fence that had never been straight. Her father said, Don’t cry for what the water takes. It only borrows. Someone else’s Rita
And at the top, she wrote: Rita, lo que el agua se llevó — y lo que aún no.