On Thursday afternoons, at approximately 3:47 PM, the retention pond floods. Frothing waves unfurl over the man-made shores, swallowing the fishing pole or foldable chair of some unsuspecting newcomer to the Neighborhood.

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The riverbed deepens into a fathomless basin, becoming a scar in the earth, third-cousin-removed of the Mariana trench. It is like a colossal stomach, stretching and warping to accommodate a new meal—though what the retention pond consumes, no one knows. The water level rises without an apparent source, turning the surrounding suburbs into marshlands. 

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(The damage was so catastrophic in the first few years, some houses were torn down and rebuilt on stilts.) 

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No one is quite sure why this happens, though some have certainly speculated—from white-lab-coated scientists to shirtless men looking on from their patios as stats from last night’s football game blare through the television—but all we’ve come to conclude is that the truth must be a combination of every theory. 

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It seems the flooding is an inherent thing—as certain as Sunday-night melancholy, as natural as the backfiring of the neighbor’s son’s car at night (the boy-scout who ching-chonged at me while circling the cul-de-sac), as in-tune to unheard rhythms of the earth as the breeding cicadas, as damning as the shame of a runaway older brother. 

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The flooding is primal, it is prehistoric, it is a thread from the past entwining with the intricate artwork of the present, and if you pull the thread, said the runaway brother, you might undo the whole tapestry. 

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When we were young, we dove under the floodwaters while frantic parents buckled their children into lifejackets. No one dared stop us. It was expected we’d do something strange. It was hoped for. 

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Our family was once also new to the Neighborhood, and though we have long since learned to fold up our lawn chairs and our identities, we will forever be a blot on the corner of an otherwise unblemished artwork. We have learned to take complaints and scrub ourselves out. 

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Runaway brother and I descended for so long I mistook the pruning of my fingers from the water to be wrinkles of old age; I experienced a lifetime within uncharted depths—where I grew kelp hair and barnacles on my brown skin, the color of driftwood and crucifixes. 

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At the bottom of the lake, my runaway brother and I found a ribcage the size of a suburban house— almost like a giant hand of bone; ebony fingers curled around debris-speckled water, clinging to wisps of flesh, an ancient ruin on a foreign, drowned planet. 

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Whale fall, said my brother, before he was a runaway. Before he knew the enormity of what we had discovered. This is the table where stripes and spots drink from the same cup.

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The carcass of the whale was a home with an open door—and darting between the ribcage, amid still-crimson blubber, was life. Life, undisturbed. Creatures with tails, tentacles, beaks, fins, ten eyes, two eyes, no eyes, gills, and rays, many of which I could not name, feeding—feasting on common spoils. Corals red and yellow and orange in coloration. 

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We shared no meals in the Neighborhood above. It was better here, I decided, and my brother agreed. So when the pond shrunk and riptides dragged us out of the depths and spat us out on shore, he went out in search of another whale fall, and I doubt when he finds one that he shall ever return.