Joy wiped at the blood dripping from her nose. She took up her brush and licked the tip into a fine edge. The bristles stung along the lines of her lips and across the scars on her tongue where the embers had roasted in her mouth.

She unwrapped her only notebook from the plastic bags and string that held it together, then opened the pages, pressing them flat one by one. After dipping the brush in a cup of water, she dragged the water across the page until the sheet buckled and curled at the edges. Even though the small woman tucked herself up into the meager line of shade offered by the doorway, the back-bending heat of the day sucked the water away.

The first painting was of the coast. The water was up. The tupelos drowned. The bark peeled from their bodies in dense husks. Joy laid in the horizon with a blend of ultramarine and turquoise, the rocks and sand in golden ochre. She re-wet the brush and splashed in the sky, mapping out the clouds with smears of white and pulling greens into the shallow areas of the sea. She traced in the edges of the town with the cars along the store fronts and the hardware store next to the park where two lovers clung to one another. Mrs. Robinson’s house materialized in grays and browns. The porch hung off the back. The bay rolled across the sedges.

Joy dipped her fingers into the cup and rubbed the water between her fingers. The molecules sought out the cracks in her dark skin. It evaporated and she chased it with her tongue, licking at the air. Then she traced in her father, a pastor, his lost edges blurring any distinction. He drove past Mrs. Robinson’s house in his Subaru and waved. Several trawlers, painted in shades of disappointed blues and troubled pinks lined towards the bay. A woman with a notebook hopped along the rocks. She snapped pictures with her phone. A breeze lifted her hair. A dolphin hunted in the surf. Along the horizon line, gulls and terns came into view.

The second painting was of the coast. The water licked the tupelos. They leaned, aimless. Their branches split. A marsh wren bubbled its song from the tip of a fuzzy cattail. With her brush, Joy laid in the horizon and the rocks in the sand and the house and the clouds and the pastor who told them not to worry, the water wouldn’t come up. He had his buckets because his house, next to the gnarled pine down below the old road that cut the marsh, was already wet. “Just subsidence,” he told Mrs. Robinson. “I read all about it on the Web.” He said that if you thought humans could control nature you were either stupid or crazy and probably both. Then he laughed and told her that it was good to see her after so long.

He made a dinner of hot dogs and canned beans. He moved his television upstairs. His walls had mold. He fished from the levee throughout the evening.

The third painting was of the coast. Joy diluted the golden ocher. The sand shone through the water. The dark colors of the storm dropped down all the way to the horizon line as she mixed burnt ombrés with blues and twirled the brush across the page to remove the thickest of the paints.

Mrs. Robinson fretted on her porch as the water splashed against the stairs. The pastor with the buckets shredded about town in the gathering rain. He wore rubber boots and a sweat-stained T-shirt. He told the people at the council meeting to have faith. “There is a creator in God who is much bigger than us. If there were a real problem, he’d take care of it,” he said calmly. He kneaded the paper in his hands into a roll and slapped it on his knee. The rain roared on the roof like a locomotive.

They discussed applications for government buy-out programs, lost property values, and flooded houses that had been rebuilt five, six, and even ten times. Nothing was decided.

Outside, they stood in several inches of greasy water that washed up over their ankles while more bubbled up from the manhole covers in the streets.

The rain didn’t stop for a week. The wind unwound the window frames.

Joy pushed her index finger into the wave and it felt grimy and oily like the sea. She coughed from the smoke in the air. A siren wailed out near the feeding stations. Joy heard a sandpiper: “Weet . . . weet,” it said. Her cheeks burned when she cried.

The fourth painting was of the coast. Plastic bags sprawled over the rocks. Insurance men were out pointing at the town, taking notes on an electronic pad. Joy traced in the tips of the tupelo trees and blocked out in whites the foam of the waves. Mrs. Robinson explained to the men that she’d lived all her life in that house; her husband was buried out next to the apple tree and her children had run in the yard there. She had a garden for pumpkins and zinnia.

“The water will come,” said one of the men. “At some point we have to admit defeat.”

Mrs. Robinson shrugged. The men shrugged.

After they drove away, the tide came in. Mrs. Robinson set out from the porch of her house in a green fiberglass canoe and she crossed the old road down through the forest skeletons using long, loping paddle strokes. A dolphin wove through the trees and, for a while, Mrs. Robinson followed the creature, pushing through masses of jellyfish. An osprey pulled a fish from the water and lit high up on a branch.

The sky was blue.

The fifth painting was of the coast. It was morning. With her finger tips, Joy dabbed at the blood dripping from her nose. The blood was thinner that morning. She hadn’t eaten in two days. She fingered the dark waters of her rinse cup. The blood turned the water a thin pink. She took up a few droplets and spread them along her lips, shaking. The roiling, salty, sewage-filled sea water had poured out from the street drains in the night, chemicals blossoming on the surface of the water.

In the daylight the pastor, thin from bailing, walked along the metal planks the fire department had placed above the flooded sidewalks. The water had crested those too and in the silvery reflection of the sun, it seemed as if he walked on water. He wanted to buy a pump. The hardware store was empty.

A red semi-tractor-trailer from a government contractor arrived. People in T-shirts passed out blue tarps.

Out along Mill Road, families crammed their things into long U-Hauls. The families along Shoreline Drive returned from their jobs uptown and sipped Bud Light from the porch, pitching pebbles and bottle caps into the water. That night the electricity faltered. The mayor sent an SMS that it would be back up in a matter of hours.

The next morning, Mrs. Robinson pushed her canoe down Main Street.

The sixth painting was of the coast. Joy used Payne’s gray for the clouds. The horizon smeared. The pastor was shirtless in the heat and Joy helped him load his things into the back of his Subaru. He was bringing mostly camping gear and rough weather clothing; the rest of it didn’t matter, he said.

“Her clothes?” Joy asked.

“She don’t need no clothes,” he said.

“Go up Cornwall way,” she told him. “Jeremy will put you up.”

He waved her away.

“It’s time to go,” Joy told him. “It will all be underwater.”

“Listen girl,” he said in his soothing voice. “Only the hubris of man would question the supremacy of Our Lord,” he quoted, raising his tone.  

He drove out along the old road to the levee and parked.

Mrs. Robinson waded through her living room and lied to her children from her phone. She said everything was fine, the water would back down soon, the photo albums were upstairs and she just needed some things from her closets. She’d hired some men to pull blue tarps over what was left of the roof. She would get a hotel room for a few days.

Joy painted in the sky with phthalo blue. Then just one star. By the bright August moon, her father sat in his Subaru searching his Bible for a passage that would explain it all. Then, frustrated, he prayed.

Joy toed the waters from a bench.

Out in the black, Mrs. Robinson sat in her canoe and cried.

The seventh painting was of the coast. The trees in the park had begun to drown. The downtown had flooded to the top of the first floor. After the electricity blinked out for the last time, there was no message from the mayor.

The pastor took his buckets and squatted at yet another place. Tom Miller’s house, this time—he’d gone upstate. When the pastor rested from bailing, he browsed the molded books the Millers had left behind.

Joy dragged a net through the water from the porch of the house she shared with a dozen others, all up from Shoreline Drive. There wasn’t enough money to leave and not enough food to stay. The net came up empty. She hadn’t expected different. It was all full of holes.

Once, a body floated by. It was bloated and pale. A man. They tied it to a tree for the night because the light was failing. In the morning it was gone.

She watched Mrs. Robinson carry her things from her canoe through the second-story window of the bank building just above the courthouse. There was nothing to eat. Then Mrs. Robinson paddled to the house the Millers had left.

The pastor looked through the screen. Mrs. Robinson was there. “Are you still dating the cellist?” she asked.

“Mary Ann left to Colorado with the rest of them,” he said.

“Open the door then,” she told him. He did.

Joy found a small notebook and a pen. She began to note everything she knew about Colorado.

She painted the nights lunar black.

The eighth painting was of the coast. Joy broke through the water. It reeked of oil and chemicals and shit. A snake curled past her thighs, making its way up the sheet water. She crawled up to a balcony on the bank building and smashed a window with a metal pipe pulled from the wall frame that had floated by her porch one day.

There were boys in there, shirtless and dingy and covered in bug bites. They frowned at her, hissing, warning her away. She showed them the metal pipe.

“Bitch,” one said.

“You’ve always been a bitch, Joy,” said another.

 They were taking cans and boxes and tools and wires. Joy pushed past them and climbed the stairs. She knocked.

“Mrs. Robinson. It’s me, Joy, from sixth grade. Mrs. Robinson?”

The door cracked, then opened. “I keep thinking,” Robinson sobbed, “tomorrow is coming today. But it never does.”

That afternoon they found a propane camp stove, canned tuna, and a box of soup in an abandoned house.

The pastor moved into the branches of a tree. He pulled two-by-fours and two-by-sixes from the walls of the Miller house. He took electrical cords and tied them together and floated them out. He built a platform and covered it with the blue tarps. Joy couldn’t reason with him.

“God remains omniscient! Omnipresent! Omnipotent in the daily affairs of men!” he said, pointing to the sky.

“Dad,” she said, and he shooed her away.

He put up his tent and hung his clothes from a line tied between the branches. He built a kitchen from plastic crates and lit a small, smoky fire in a bucket to keep the mosquitos away.

When the water came up through the second floor of the bank building, Mrs. Robinson paddled her things out and moved into the tree.

The ninth painting was of the coast. It wasn’t where it should have been. The pastor polled a six-log raft through the ghost forest and the storm-ravaged rooftops while the dolphin observed him. It blew sweet, cylindrical bubbles and he smiled. He wondered how all this could happen. The world reeked of rot.

He trolled the waters with a longline of hooks as he made his way down Main Street and across the park. Back in the tree he cleaned and gutted the fish for Joy and Mrs. Robinson. “Look,” Joy said, and pulled out six cans of beans and three of creamed corn.

Mrs. Robinson asked Joy, “Where can we go?” and “When can we go?”

The pastor said “Go?” He looked at them in disgust.

“Go. Away.”

Joy looked around the cold little room under the tarps. “I give myself for food,” she said to Mrs. Robinson and closed her eyes. She cried, humiliated.

Mrs. Robinson nodded.

“This wasn’t part of the deal,” the man relented. He stabbed one of the fishes and chucked it into the water. The dolphin snatched it up and twirling, disappeared.

The tenth painting was of the coast. It was far back up, nearly to Black Bluff, and there was a camp of aid tents from Canada and China, and structures built of wooden pallets and corrugated metal that sheltered under blue tents there along the pines. Smoke from cooking fires curled into the sky. Staring out from under her tarps in the lone tree, Mrs. Robinson watched a crusted sailboat lurk past. It sat low in the water, heavy with looted furniture and metal and wire from the houses on the point. The woman on the bowsprit directed them carefully through the maze of treetops, chimneys, church steeples, and rooftops undulating and dissembling just under the surface. There was no wind. Not one of them waved.

The night was black like none before. Mrs. Robinson could see the twinkling campfires on the bluff and the lights of Lexington up north and the lamps of the ships out where there used to be land. The air was hot but Mrs. Robinson was cold.

The eleventh painting was of the coast. Joy lined in the house with the edge of her brush and filled it with grays. For the big, old sycamores, she mixed hematite with sap green and slapped the colors on the paper in globs. Kudzu trailed up the trunks and to the roof of the house, which was patched with the blue tarps.

Joy sat on the porch. Several boats were tied up below. The branches caught the wind that swallowed the house. The windows and the doors were all open and the house was filled with people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, leave. They were of all ages, from the coast. They couldn’t charge their devices. The only news came from an old wind-up FM radio, but mostly that was just music. They stole food from the drowning houses around them and sometimes from each other. They played cards and drank and smoked into the night. They shat out the windows into the water. They came and went in the boats, looting or stealing or trading for what they needed or, really, for anything they could find, alternately helping and using one another for sex and food and anything else that would numb. They were all sick from the mold and the mosquitos and the heat. They fought each other and they cried together. Joy could see the platform in the tree from the porch of the house. She painted in the blue tarps. Blue upon blue upon indifferent blue. At night they were a pinpoint of light, there in that tree.

When the rain fell, it came in drenching waves and it didn’t matter if you were inside or out. Joy held open the palms of her hands and felt the stinging of the drops. One night, water came up and into the house.

Somewhere in the weeks, Joy lost count of the paintings. The water came up to the tops of even the largest trees. It came to the base of the platform in the tree. Late one night the lights from Lexington blinked, then the city went dark.

“We need to leave,” said Mrs. Robinson.

“I didn’t think it,” said the pastor, shaking his head no. The water splashed up between the planks of wood that made up the floor. At high tide they were standing in an inch of sea water. That night, he’d bailed the platform until dawn and could barely stand he was so tired. “But now I see,” he said.

Every day was achingly hot.

“We punished ourselves,” Mrs. Robinson said to Joy one day. The house was gone now. Joy lived mostly in the camps on the bluff. Sometimes when she brought them plastic jugs of water she stayed and slept in the breeze on the platform there in the tree.

One morning, Mrs. Robinson tried to light the little propane stove but it flooded out and flared and she blew on it violently to cut the flame. Joy said it was time to leave.

“Where?”

“Colorado.”

The man laughed. “Colorado. Pffffft. I’m going home.”

“Home?” Mrs. Robinson broke into a hyena howl of laughter. “It’s time to find a new one.”

“God is still up there!” He shouted, pointing into the blue. “The arrogance of people to imagine we could possibly change what he is doing is an outrage!”

“Let’s go,” said Joy.

“Tomorrow,” Mrs. Robinson told Joy, and Joy painted Mrs. Robinson in a floral dress standing out in the wind.

The pastor threw down the pots and pans and crashed his fist into the ladder they used to climb to where they slept. Then, with walloping smacks and grunts he nailed a chair to his raft. He poled and paddled his raft into the evening and through the shadows cast by the treetops. The dolphin followed.

Another painting was of the coast. But there was no coast. Only the turgid blue. And one last tree topping the rim of the sea. Joy took the food and water she could find. She stole away in a small craft she knew she wouldn’t return and motored out to them where the sky met the sea. A trawler passed her, pulling up nets filled with nothing more than sloppy jellyfish. One man waved but the rest were bent under the sun.

“I came to get you!” she shouted to Mrs. Robinson and her father.

Mrs. Robinson waved her away. Her father waved her in.

“What did you bring?” he growled from the shade of the tarp. A bright bruise blossomed on Mrs. Robinson’s face. Her thin biceps were black and blue. A fat bass sprawled on the bench.

“Nothing. I came to get you off. There’s a place. Let’s go.”  

Mrs. Robinson caught the line Joy tossed out. The pastor pulled it from her hands, pushed her to the side then jabbed a long pole at Joy’s boat. “Get out unless you got something to offer,” he said.

She sat in her boat, just off the platform, just out of reach. Her father screamed at Mrs. Robinson. Metal crashed together. The dolphin finned the surface but mostly sheltered beneath the boat.

The next painting was of the sea. And a tree. That’s all there was. Another storm came up. It wasn’t even one of the city-swallowing monsters that passed to the south. Joy splashed the pain grays into the drowned blues and a wave crested in frothy white.

She arrived in the boat, sweating from the dank, super-heated wind.

“Border patrol is allowing a train to Denver on Thursday,” she shouted above the blow.  I’m going.”

“Get the hell out of here, girl!” screamed her father.

Mrs. Robinson made a dash for the boat but the old man caught her up and body-slammed her to the platform. She gasped, helplessly. Joy gunned the smoking motor on the back of her boat and rammed the platform. The entire tree tilted. She reversed the boat and crashed into the tree a second time.

Next, Joy painted the fire.

She jumped from the boat, the front line in her hand, and ran straight for her father. He grabbed up one of his buckets and brought it down towards her head. She tripped and fell and the bucket just missed her. The tree tilted still further. Hot yellows flared from the propane stove. The flame licked in cadmium orange. He kicked her in the face, then the ribs and she curled in a ball. Water spilled onto the platform. Joy dabbed at the drips of blood on her upper lips and smeared them into the flame, adding a deep crimson lick. The flare played across the tarps in red and sepia and then indigo. 

Again, the platform slumped and the crates outside the kitchen slid into the water. The burning kitchen pitched and fell on top of them.

Joy couldn’t find a way to paint the blue tarps melting across her face and head and arms and even down to her legs. She couldn’t find a way to paint how the pain seared through her body. She didn’t know how to paint the embers that sucked into her mouth, roasting her tongue. She could only paint in the wave that crashed across the platform, dumping them all into the sea.

“God doesn’t help!” she heard her father shout, and he disappeared under a curling, purple wave lined in brush strokes.

At some point, she painted the train. She painted the cars jammed with refugees from the sea. She painted the drying prairie in a lemony yellow. She mixed yellow ocher and sap green and alizarin crimson so that she could paint in the sagebrush. Then she painted the mountains in cobalt blues and shades of purple. She painted the black smoke, the lines of people, the Border Patrol taking the children from their parents. The tents. The women. But they were all wrong, she decided. She didn’t know what colors to use for all that was happening.

Camp Exxon26 was a sprawl of sweltering shelters at the foot of the mountains. The Colorado sky was filled with smoke. Everyone coughed. Always. The children were all gone. Women in cast-off clothing waited and filed paperwork that disappeared into the ether. They wrapped their faces in fabrics and waited some more. Three trim drones passed along the perimeter, buzzing the wires and the aid wagons waiting for permission to deliver food.

Joy painted herself at the water’s edge. She stripped to her swimsuit and dove into the bay, stubbing her toe on a barnacle-covered rock just below the lip of the water. The dolphin greeted her with a bark. It wrapped her in a thick blanket of bubbles that popped from the purple paints reverberating with the song of the sleek, gray being. Down they went, curling into the blue.

Eventually, she rose along a line of rocks and crawled into the sun. She shivered and nursed the toe. She shook the water from her body and looked out from the doorframe through the heat to the mountains. Then she returned to the ocean.

In blues and greens and golds she began again, mapping her coastline.