The world was formed from raw chaos.  It swirled and mingled beyond all comprehension with no rules, no order, nothing but the sheer energy of being.  Science and religion both struggled to find a reason as to why this chaos became order, the stuff of the universe coming together and melding like metal in a mold until the world was formed.  Reality became.  Order.  Rules and laws that could be understood.  And so all the stuff of raw change subsided and drew in on itself, taming its nature into something new and giving birth to its own prison, that thing that holds the world together under established principles.

Not all pieces of chaos became reality, however.



Allison's earliest memory was of water.  She slipped and fell into the deep end of the pool, where the water was as dark as night and seemed to pull her down with eager arms.  She did not know how to swim.  Her mother pulled her out within seconds but the memory was there, an eternity of a malicious embrace.  She did not remember being saved.  She only remembered the water.

As these things often do, it grew until she had a phobia.

Allison grew up and started school.  Her family moved once or twice before settling down in the middle of America where the ground was flat and storms could be seen blanketing the entire sky.  She would sit on the front porch and watch until the lightning drew close and it was safer to be inside while the rain pounded on the windows, demanding entrance.  

She went to high school.  She made friends.  She found people she didn't like.  Such was the way of the world.

One muggy day in summer Allison took a trail.  She hiked it often, sometimes with friends, and today she walked it with her mother.  There was a rock laying on the packed earth and the two took turns kicking it, letting it bounce and roll along the trail until they made it back to the parking lot, the rock still with them.  Her mother put it in one of the cup holders of the car, a souvenir of the day spent together, for soon Allison would start college.

When she did, her parents gave her the car for use and the rock was still sitting in the cup holder.

In college she made friends.  She met people she didn't like.  She struggled with her schoolwork.  Such was the way of the world.  And on one day, feeling a bit homesick, she took the rock from the cup holder, remembering the muggy day in the summer, and took it with her to class.  It sat in her pocket and she barely noticed the weight, only the feel of it on her fingers, as dry as the earth.

Somewhere inside that stone, primal chaos stirred.



Her friends were laughing at her.  Allison just smiled sheepishly and accepted their teasing.

“You've got to have one,” one said, pulling out the drawers of her dresser, “Seriously.  Where are you hiding it?”

“I don't,” Allison protested, lodging herself between the dresser and her friends, “Honestly.  I'm scared of swimming.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

The girls looked at each other, laughed, and shrugged.

“Then we'll just go swimming last.”

The school rec center had an Olympic size pool.  The girls liked to do laps along with running the track or playing volleyball.  Allison wasn't so fond of volleyball either, as she had a habit of hitting the ball the wrong way so that it left bruises.  So they went, ran some laps, and when her friends changed into their bathing suits she changed back into her normal clothes.  The stone sat in her pocket.

Allison stopped to watch her friends as they made their laps.  The water there was clear and she could see the bottom.  Further down, where the pool grew deep, the bottom was hazy, indistinct, and she was reminded of why she didn't like water.  It seemed more real this day and for a moment her subconscious went back to a time where there was no land, before God told the seas to recede.  She shivered and walked away, her pace fast, and she left the center to meet them at the dining hall when they were done swimming.

They were early.  They got food, their hair still wet and smelling of chlorine, and sat down.

“It was really odd,” one said, “I noticed first that the water level seemed to be getting higher.  Then I guess someone that worked there noticed and ushered us all out, saying that maybe the system that cycles the water was broken.  By the time we left the pool had overflowed – honest! - and there was about a half foot of water in the room.  Got through the door and had soaked the carpet outside the locker room.  It was weird.”

Allison didn't say much about that and had nightmares about drowning that night.  The stone sat on her desk and fed on a vision that could not be controlled.

It rained the next day.  The sky was a slate gray and puddles had formed on the sidewalks and shallow depressions in the grass by noon.  By evening there were small ponds in some areas and one section of sidewalk was underwater.  This was not unusual.  The pool was still flooded and the rec center was closed.  Rumors said the pool room now contained more water than actually existed in its system.  The theory was that something was broken and that rain water was running into the building.

Morning came, and basements were flooded.  The river was rising.  Allison stayed in her room, watching out the window.  She skipped all her classes that day, afraid.

“If it floods,” her roommate told her, “We'll be fine.  We're above the flood plain.  A foot of water in someone's basement isn't a disaster.”

Her subconscious showed her the river, sweeping its arms wide to engulf everything around it.  Trees bowing their heads to the water, houses smashed to pieces, and the desperate struggle to stay afloat while screaming for help that would not come from the merciless sky that poured down rain.

A flood warning was issued the next day.

Two more days and the campus was evacuated.  Allison drove her car back to her parent's house who were glad to have her home safely.  She kept the stone in the cup holder but found herself returning to it, despite the pouring rain, and finally she brought it in the house and kept it with her.  It reminded her of hot summer days while the quiet part of her mind reminded her of how it felt to be engulfed by the water, merciless and unfathomable.

The river and the campus became an epicenter.  More towns were evacuated and the National Guard was called in.  The news showed footage of sandbag walls breaking and water pouring out of the holes, like kicking over an ant hill.  Scientists were confused, they said, citing that perhaps the weather pattern had changed.  Allison had to leave the room.

More news came.  The oceans were rising.  Footage of beach houses being washed away by the tide played non-stop.  The river looked more like a lake and it showed no sign of stopping.

“There simply isn't this much water,” someone on the news said, “Not unless the ice caps melted – which they haven't.  There simply isn't this much water.”

Allison cried herself to sleep that night.  Her town was to be evacuated and she would have to leave everything behind again, as she did when she left her college.

She huddled in the back of the car that morning as her parents followed the instructed route out of town.  She turned the stone over and over in her hand.  It felt safe.  Like it was taking her nightmares away.  She was jolted out of her daze when her father swore and hit the breaks.

“It's washed out,” he said.  She sat up and looked through the front window.  The road in front of them was a running river.  Small bits of debris were caught up in its muddy surface.

“It's growing,” Allison said, panic suddenly seizing her heart.

“No, it's fine.”

Her father put the car in reverse.  Allison clung to the door of the car, pressed against the window, watching.  It was rising.  It was.  She knew it.  Her father swore some more and she felt the car lurch, then heard the helpless spinning of wheels.  No one said anything and Allison could feel the naked panic growing inside the vehicle.  The river WAS growing.  The front of the car dipped as the water tore the road away.

“Out!” her father commanded.  She bolted like a startled deer.

She backed away, the rock in her hand.  Her mother slipped on the crumbling road and fell.  The river scooped her up and she clawed at the bank, screaming.  Then a branch slammed into her and the last thing Allison saw was her father reaching out for her strawberry-blond hair and then the river closing in over it.  Allison was sobbing, clutching the stone near to her chest.  She had to get away.  She had to get away before the river came and claimed her.  And so she ran.  And the roar of the water pursued her, the figment of chaos pressed so close to her skin drinking these emotions in.

She wandered aimlessly and everywhere she went the water pursued her.  She found the high ground until it no longer became the high ground.  She did not grow hungry or thirsty and somehow, a wild notion entered her head that this stone, this strange, ordinary, object she held protected her.  It felt warm all the time now and she relied on it for comfort.  It took her fear away, leeching it from her subconscious and putting it... elsewhere.

That was how she found her friends.  Perhaps the stone brought them to her, or perhaps it brought her to them.  Either way, a group from her school were huddled on a hill, the last bit of high land around.  The water had consumed everything else.  Only the very tops of the houses were visible in the distance.  Most of them were crying and Allison stood in the middle, in a daze.  No one spoke, just watched the water rise.

It reached her ankles.  No one was coming to save them.  The world was falling apart, buried beneath the water, and no one was coming to save them.  Her hand gripped the rock so tight that her fingernails bit into her palm and drew blood.  It would pull them under, all of them, like it had tried to so many years ago.  Her friends cried and prayed.  All she wanted was to be away, be above where the water could reach her.

And the stone obliged the desires of her heart and mind.  She was above the water, floating, the air as solid below her as the ground.  Her friends stared, ready to believe anything as their world flooded.  They looked to Allison.

“Help us!” one cried.

Allison wept.  She saw her mother's hair vanishing in the water.

“I can't,” she said.

“Save us!”

“I can't,” she whispered.

The stone was warm and reassured her.  It took her fears away and sent them elsewhere, breaking the rules of order and reality for the sake of her subconscious.  It would keep her from the waters.  It would not keep the waters from the earth.

She wanted to be away.  The water was up to her friend's knees and one fell, the current pulling his feet beneath him, and he was gone, one hand reaching for a sky that had not seen the sun for weeks.  Allison turned her head and wanted to be away.  The begging and screaming of her friends, their terror as the water surged and devoured the last high point sounded in her ears even as the stone took her elsewhere, hovering above the water.  It churned, black and calling her name.  She kept the stone close to her chest.

Strand by strand, reality unwound itself as this loose piece of chaos touched it.  Allison could not let go of the stone for it protected her, warm and kept her above the water, and it drew on her nightmares and used that primal force that was creation to create a new world, one where there was no land, no life, only the endless expanse of water wherever Allison willed that she wanted to be.  She felt she was going mad.

Maybe months passed.  Maybe years.  She had no way to tell.  Her family was gone.  Her friends died begging her to save them.  And the waters had covered the earth, a hell of her own imagining.

It was too much for one person.  The only source of warmth and safety she held close to her chest and one day, one moment, Allison couldn't bear a world waiting to consume her any more.

She let go.  And the stone fell into the water and was gone, and she fell as well, and the water opened its arms to welcome her.

It was like she was a child again.  The water had no bottom, just darkness reaching up to pull her into its steel embrace.  She sucked in water, filling her lungs, and as the stone drifted away to find some place to settle, the person that had been feeding its chaotic force drowned.

And reality asserted itself once more.  The water receded. The rains stopped.  The earth came from the waters and in time, the plants came as well.  They covered the broken highways, the houses, the bones, and the stone that held within it a fragment of creation.  And it waited.