The Valley and the Flood Rebecca Mahoney (top 10 motivational books TXT) 📖

in the whirling mass of adrenaline and summer haze, your sense of time was the first thing to go.

You don’t see if they come in together, but it’s unlikely that a group of nine strangers formed a flash mob to ruin your fucking day. By the time you look, they are thoroughly and overwhelmingly everywhere. A pair of boys by the entrance. A man rifles through the hangers, metal against metal, plastic against plastic. A cluster of women decide, consciously or not, that whatever rack they want is the one behind you. You slip from aisle to aisle. They trail you, their laughter high and sharp.

Hypervigilance. You know that it makes sounds louder, it makes proximity nearer, and that when your world narrows, the exit is all there is. But when a woman parks her stroller by the next rack, hems you into that stretch of aisle, you forget every bit of diagnostic criteria you’ve ever learned.

This is what it would be like to have your thoughts blasted apart by dynamite. You have the actions, even the order—move around the women, move around the boys, move out the door. You can’t string them together. They’re too much. It’s pounding, through your chest and to your fingers, you’re trapped, you’re trapped, you’re trapped.

To them, what happens next looks like nothing. If it looks like nothing to the people who love you, it most certainly looks like nothing to these strangers. It flickers through your mind almost too quick to register, a thought with definition and color in a sea of whirling white.

Push her.

Then the stroller shifts, leaves an opening, and you jump for it. Once you have momentum, the rest snaps into place: a quick and rigid smile to the cashier, a polite mumble to the boys at the door, and a slow breath out as you tumble into the summer heat. In, out. In, out. Like you’re supposed to do.

It’s a little funny now. You imagine Gaby wrinkling her nose at you—You tried to push a baby? You should savor these moments while you have them, these days. Those moments before you overthink.

Because note to self: It will hit you. It always does. It will settle on you in hour three of the long night to come: those words burnt into your brain, the itch of potential energy in your hands. There’s a word for that feeling. Something you’ve never felt for people who’ve earned it, let alone nine loud and harmless strangers.

Rage.

Thirteen THE BRINGER OF CALAMITY

I ALWAYS THOUGHT I knew the desert. The nights were my time out here—with the Astronomy Club, with my family, with Gaby, looking for faint stars and little forgotten civilizations.

I’m squinting in my sunglasses as we cross the terrace from the station to the parking lot, the light bouncing off the pavement and right back into my face. “Where did we park?”

“Right down that way.” Felix is smirking at me. Which I’m not sure I appreciate.

I’m still half-turned to him as I reach the bottom of the steps. So I completely miss the person I’m about to bowl over.

“Oh!” I stumble back, laughing to cover the quick punch of adrenaline. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

But in a way I’m beginning to recognize now, the scene has changed.

I blink. The person two inches from my face blinks back at me. It’s a woman with a short black bob and thin penciled eyebrows, a stranger. It’s what’s around her that I recognize. The racks, the ’80s wallpaper, the warm dusty smell of the Second Time’s the Charm thrift shop. And the stroller resting under her light grip.

In real life, though, she was looking at a sweater. She wasn’t looking at me with blank, unblinking eyes.

She wasn’t soaking wet, either.

I flinch. But the shop twists away like a curtain, up and out of existence. I’m back at the steps of the terrace, but one thing stays the same: someone’s standing in front of me, staring.

Not for long, though. His hands go slack, the flyer he’s holding drifting to the ground like a paper airplane, and he straight-up bolts across the parking lot without a single glance back.

I can hear Cassie calling out to me, but the others are still a few steps behind. It gives me a second to catch my breath.

“Rose?” Cassie says again. I hear the sound of footsteps quickening behind me, the others catching up. “What was that?”

I can still see the man’s retreating back, shimmering in the desert haze. “I’m not sure.”

“And what is that,” Felix says, nodding to the flyer. I stoop to the pavement, pick it up, and unfurl it.

TO ALL LOTUS VALLEY CITIZENS:

The mayor’s office requests your presence and participation at an emergency town hall meeting this evening, eight p.m., to vote on the best course of action regarding the dangerous interloper and bringer of calamity, Ms. Rose Colter. Further information on the imminent threat will be available on channel three.

GO ARMADILLOS!

The flyer concludes with a loopy, feminine signature—one I recognize from the note on my door this morning.

“A vote,” I mutter. “She’s gonna vote me out?”

“Well,” Alex says, his voice a little queasy. “Not you, exactly.”

Right. Of course. It’s not just me they want gone, is it?

Felix tilts the poster to the side, as if that’ll help. “She knows the Armadillos’ season ended in November, right?”

“It’s not funny,” Cassie says quietly. I turn to her, halfway to saying that I get to decide if it’s funny—until I catch the look on her face and clamp my mouth shut. It’s my flood, but it’s her home.

Felix falls into step alongside me as we cross the parking lot, and there’s a beat after he leans in. “Do you wanna drive?”

My head snaps toward him. He looks a little embarrassed, maybe. But dead serious. “What?”

He shrugs, his blush creeping down his neck. “It seemed to help, before.”

“I . . .” For a long moment, all I can do is gape. “We’re on a schedule. It’s just gonna slow us