I used to think drowning wouldn't be so bad. But the cold seeps into your bones and roots there. The waves will sleep with you still. Drowning... it creeps up on you. It slips into your city, past the forecasts, and wipes you out. And at the bottom of a lake you once called home, you'll find yourself face to face with the dragon. The Great White Dragon who feasts on whole cities and drowns burrows until rabbits spill out, bloated and ripe. Death will not cradle you or rock you into sleep. He comes to blot you out.
It happened slowly. Rain slipping down a window. Wind howling somewhere far away. My feet solid against the tile floor. Nothing more than a storm. A storm. A blackout. A blackout, with only lightning and cellphones flashing white against the floodwater. I couldn't see past my own hands. Past the girl in front of me. Even when I was pressed against the warped glass of a window, all I saw was the wind like a harpy pounding on the glass doors and floating ocean of rain. I couldn't tell if it was thunder or hundreds of feet pounding in my skull. Someone let out a long, high-pitched scream that seemed to last an eternity. Layered over as many voices becoming one, the ceaseless shriek of fish in a barrel. An alarm went off, or was it still the screaming? And people pushing and telling me to run. He's here. The water – the water it's coming up the stairs! Run –! Help, my sister, she – help! Rain crashed against the glass like a white froth bull. Lightning illuminating pure white against darkness. Water filled in my throat. And I couldn't run away, I couldn't scream, I couldn't even close my eyes. All I could do was stare directly into the soul of a beast who wanted nothing more than to swallow me whole.
The water pushed under the glass doors, bending the metal up like a soda tab and pouring the foam in. My foot slipped into a puddle, and the black water left a ring of muck around my ankle. I saw it lap the bottom of the stairs, the first splash of water pooling onto the landing. And I ran.
I don't remember climbing into the car. Coughing up water. Starting the ignition. I vaguely noted the wind slamming against the window, trying to rip doors from their hinges or crush us like a plastic-wrapped mint. Then, my sister sprinting to me, her mouth moving but no words coming out. It all happened in slow motion, utterly silent until she swings the door open. I grabbed her to pull her into the car, the wind catching on the car door like a hangnail. Close it! She shouted. Close it! I snapped back to reality, felt the rain whipping against my face, the scream of wind, the face of my little sister next to me. I wrenched the door shut and pressed my foot against the gas.
We drove past black lakes and broken streetlamps, past fallen trees and flooded homes. Electrical wires and sewer water and death stared at me from the black flood. The great leviathan tore its way through our city, leaving nothing in its watery trail except ground up mulch-homes and corpses. The abandoned cars littered the streets like colorful fish overturned in an oil spill. As we passed the flooding houses, we saw a woman scooping water from her home and pouring the buckets outside. I imagine the anthills outside her window much feel drowned as we do now. Under the endless, suffocating rain that meant to flush us out of our homes into the mouth of the Great White Dragon. I drove as fast as I dared, passing sunken treasure and capsizing cruise ships and a woman pulling a child from her sinking car, her little Achilles. Holding him close before the whipping tail of white death spun around them.
We abandon the car forty feet from our house. The water is too deep, too dark, to even try. All we can do is run for it. On the count of three. I carry both backpacks. Pull my sister into my lap and grip her wrist, not trusting her small hands.

One... the thunder rumbled like the gurgling mouth of Charybdis. Like the roar of the Great Dragon. The ominous water circles around us. The wind-harpies shriek and laugh like vultures.

Two... it's too late to save anyone but ourselves. We have to run; all we can do is run. I try to look confident, but her tiny solemn face catches like water in my throat and I choke. Like water in my city, drowning us into mud and tiny ant corpses. Like water in the street growing, growing, growing to reach me. Like water in that woman's house or the cars we passed – we didn't look but maybe they weren't abandoned after all. Maybe they weren't filled with only water. I imagine the face of the baby she pulled out of the waves. The car that filled with water like a sponge. My own car filling with the same water, the water, the water and I'm gasping for breath –

Three!
We sprint, pushed by the breath of the dragon, the white wind of the devil. I grip her hand so hard it bruises trying to keep her from flying away like the tumbling trashcans and mailboxes flung through the street by some invisible hand. The first two times we trip I pull her up again – drag her onward. The third time we collapse against the cement, and I can't wrench us from the wind. My shaky legs keep giving out under me until a great force pulls us forward. I look up, expecting some harpy to have entrapped me in their claws, but see my mother pulling us through the door. I remember vomiting up water, exorcising myself of some wet creature. And even though I can't open my eyes against the water, I hear his mighty roar. My mother pushes us hard and tries to force us out of the way. To behind the door, letting the water pour into our house as we catch our breaths. What is that! My sister cries out, coughing, drowning, dying. It's him. I say, heaving air into my chest. It's the Great White Dragon. I reach my hands against the door, and it takes all of us pushing at our greatest strength to dislodge it from the grip of the dragon. We can see one scaly hand from here and I let out a scream that seems to disappear right into the waves. The water laps, seeping into our dry house. We push on the door and the dragon pushes back. We still can't see him, but we don't need to. We know he means to take us back into the waves he was born in. With one great push the door slams shut, and for a moment I do manage to see him. The open mouth of the White Dragon, not red as they told me, but white like a whale, filled with the bloated, pale corpses of the unlucky. It was just a glimpse, but it is burned into my memory. One isn't likely to forget the face of death.
My mother locks the door, throws her weight against it waiting for the harpies to grow bored with us. When the pressure leaves the frame, we collapse. She dries us with towels, but the scent of the dragon's breath remains. How could we know the water was in our souls? That we would never be dry again? We climb into bed and hold each other, squeezing our eyes shut trying to find sleep, but the flood wraps its cold fingers around our bones. We dream of drowning that night. The storm raging outside trying to get in, and all we can do is hold each other like ships against our dock of a bed and bear the rocking of the storm. We hold each other in the darkness and swear the water rises into the bed. And although we survive the waves, I drown in the storm of that night. I still drown at night. I'm drowning now.