Chelsea Werner-Jatzke
Any Old Apocalypse
You are the clog in the pipe in the ceiling. This explains the leak from the pipe in the space between the floor above and the ceiling above the bathtub. The pipe, soft and corroded, bubbles the ceiling and gathers in the basin for bathing. Maintenance doesn’t have the snake they need to clear the clog. When the boxed in claw foot can no longer contain the leak and it puddles in the indents of one hundred years of footsteps, shuffles, knees and backs pressed into the wood warped floor, no one minds. It means the clog is still in the pipe demanding overflow, off-site retainers, and buckets and buckets for catching all the leaking resulting from that space filled.
As the floor expands and the walls push away and someone enters the apartment and notices their ankles wet and the second story collapses into the first story and the leak water falls, no one minds. There will be casualties.
When the water level is high enough to encounter the pipe of its source and the water bubbles and gurgles at the point of leakage, everyone thinks it’s cute. When it goes silent as the pipe is submerged, the building filling to the top, everyone is placing bets on how it will end. When the nails bend out and the sealant peels away and the bricks dissolve and the glass shatters under the pressure of the water and the pressure of their square frames forced trapezoidal, then the dam of the building breaks and the water from the leak from the clog stops eeking out from under the front door and looses a radial tidal. The winners do not collect on the bets; everyone wrong is underwater.
When the tide finds its edge for a moment of calm and the leak goes on leaking from the pipe exposed now, it offers something to look up to from the edges of the lake the leak has claimed. These depths change every day and the stakes rise in the gambling culture everyone now lives in. The losers find their pets drowned, the photographs and artifacts of their memories consumed. The winners ban bridges from floating across the increasing leak made lake so that every inch of shore is accessible to the expansion.
The winners become ship builders, deep-water divers, historians of this new era, archiving what is lost under the surface of this sea steady rising. There is a new math, a new measurement
Chelsea Werner-Jatzke | 25