The Weight of an Empty Reservoir
A drought summer and the streambed it uncovered.
When the water finally dropped low enough, the old road reappeared first, then the foundations, then the argument about whose fault it was.
The reservoir had been full my whole life, a flat gray plane you drove past without looking twice. This summer it dropped six feet, then ten, and the town that had been drowned to build it started coming back one stone at a time.
Nobody had thought to mark where the old church stood. We found it by accident, a low rectangle of foundation stone the color of wet ash, and stood around it the way people stand around a grave they did not know they were visiting.
The engineers say the water will come back with the fall rains. Most people I talked to hoped it would, if only to put the town away again where it could not be looked at directly.
