The Floods

• Levi Carroll, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2022

It was just another cloudy, rainy, wet day and the stench was getting worse. I sat with my puppy watching the sky pour down on us. It just kept raining – and felt like an eternity until it would stop. I was very upset because I wanted to go and play on the thick, green, luscious grass. But it was like playing in mud. All we did was make puzzles and play inside. The pool was at the maximum it could get to. It was now raining cats and dogs. I thought it was never going to end. The water kept creeping up to the house but never reached it. No one knew what was going to happen for the rest of the week! I went outside and a terrible stench came rushing into my nose, I saw pouring rain, heard the bashing thunder, tasted dirty air, and felt a hundred rain drops touching my hand.

That night I woke to pouring rain that sounded like tin cans being bashed together. It was so wet and damp that even school was closed the next day! I went outside trying to clear the bark and plants away from the drain in the backyard. Then, I turned on the news and houses were covered with water. People had died. Thankfully, some had been rescued. You could barely see the gutters on some of the houses. I thought about what I just saw and realised, then and there, that I should be grateful and thankful that it didn’t happen to us. I grabbed my gumboots and our family packed some supplies, we drove for hours, we knew what we had to do.