by Ellie Pierson
We built the Dam for a reason. We ground the rough edges and welded the frame. It crawled up and up and up. My grandfather worked on this dam. And his grandfather. A multi-generational project just to keep the flood at bay. On my first day on the Front, they started by showing me a memorial to all the foolish men who fell between the two walls that separate the dry valley from the ocean. Their corpses fill the gaps between the cement. They were too far down to be fished back up for a funeral. The Ledge was too high up for our lungs. Every mechanic on the force had a mandatory respiratory aid. I inherited Father’s.
Mother and I did not receive his ashes. All we got was a square of wood–polished with the oil they used to grease the cement buckets–with his initials and death date crudely carved into it. The man who gifted this to us handed the square to Mother and my father’s toolbox to me. He said I’d start in the morning. He said I was the right man for the mechanics. Mother cried and screamed and begged him not to take me too, but the man just shrugged. He gave me ten minutes to pack up my childhood before lugging my life out to the buggy that would take me to the Dam. Rules are rules, the man told Mother. I packed my things as quickly and as neatly as I could. I wanted to leave my room tidy for a Mother who would likely have to find another son. As he took me away, I wondered if I’d ever see her again.
I looked through my father’s tool box that night, alone in his bunk I inherited. The mechanics in the barracks around me pointed, saying that I was my father’s spitting image in hushed whispers. They said he was back and wondered if he had ever even fallen at all. I didn’t hear them. I had found my father’s notebook. The pages were grubby, smudged with grease, dirt, sweat. Father worked hard. He had logs of hours written in, sometimes he’d only sleep for an hour or two before returning to the Ledge. Was this my future? He’d sketched locations of contraband stashes. About halfway through, I found his poetry in the margins of hours and logs. In the poems, he begged for mercy, for forgiveness. He begged Mother and me to remember the love he had for us. He pledged his end to the good of humanity, claiming his actions were for the greater good. The notebook ended.
His tools were neatly organized, labeled locations for where each tool belonged. His chisel and hammer were missing. I knew then that he had not gone to the Ledge on his last day to use his tools to build.
The next morning, I went to the Ledge, where I knew my father had taken his last lunch break. I sat down, looking out over the side of the Dam that faced the ocean. My feet dangled in the air. It smelled fresh, clean. The valley didn’t smell like this. An older mechanic yelled at me to put my respirator back on, to stop acting like a newbie. This high up, newbies weren’t used to the thinness of the air touching their lungs. They would fall once the thin air reached their brain. I ignored his warnings. I ate my sandwich and embraced the floating sensation that was reaching my mind. The mechanic left me alone when someone else whispered that I was Father’s boy, a lively one. There was no stench from the corpses, not up here.
I laid back on the metal grate that functioned as the floor. It would soon be removed as the water levels grew higher, as the dam grew taller. The angles of the metal settled in around my spine. It was a welcome, cool release of my mere half a day’s work. A bird flew overhead, the same one my father had sketched next to his poems in the margins. It looked like Mother if she knew the taste of freedom. What had we done to deserve this? The deep reservoir that supposedly sustained life let its small waves crash against the Dam wall.
The bird landed on the grate next to me. It pecked at a crumb of bread that had fallen onto the head of a screw. The screw came loose and dropped between the lines of the grates. I listened as it fell between the walls. The mechanic handbook they had drilled into my mind the night before told me I should report the missing screw, but I couldn’t will myself to return to the Front and leave the Ledge. The bird continued to peck at the grate, a fruitless search for more crumbs. It stared at me for a moment before flying off into the valley below, once a great river and a lively field of lush foliage. Waves crashed against the damn wall.
I grabbed Father’s toolbox and dug out the rope and headlamp. Mother had made certain I knew how to climb before the mechanics inevitably absorbed me into their masses. I was thankful for her training as I scuttled down between the walls. I repelled from grate to grate, creating a loop I could double over and tug free when I made it to the next level down. I had abandoned Father’s toolbox and my respirator. I wouldn’t need them where I was going. The deeper I went, the more the water reverberated through the chasm, an echo of the death below. The deeper I went, the more I could smell the rot.
I found my father’s body easily; his was the freshest corpse. He still gripped the chisel and hammer. I touched his clammy cheek. He hadn’t been dead for very long. My headlamp shined on the wall, highlighting the hole he had started. I could finish his job, I knew I could. I held the chisel up to the concrete laid generations before. I could hear the ocean on the other side. I could hear it. It called me home, to the damp lushness that would sustain us, truly sustain us. I would be pulverized by the waves. I would drown in this sea of corpses. I hammered down. The skin of the dead man beneath my boots ripped away. I felt the connections between muscle and bone tear with each slam of the hammer. He was falling apart. The dust from the concrete filled the air, filled my lungs. It smelled. It stank of failure. I could wash it away; I would make the valley clean again. The ocean would remember. It would know where to go, what to do. It would save Mother and the son she would have to replace me with.
The chisel did its job. The moment I breached the other side, a small dribble of water came first, followed by the instant barrage of a flood. It streamed forward in a sharp jet, hitting my chest, and pushed me down into the sea of bodies. I watched as the gap widened, the water destroying the concrete around it. The ancestral concrete crumbled, quickly filling the chasm between both sides of the Dam walls. It came up to my knees first and I stumbled among the corpses, trying to return to Father. I would take him home. He would see Mother again. We would see Mother again.
I heard the shattering of an illusion before my headlamp died. I gripped Father around his chest as we sank together. We were coming home. The sea would take us. The sea would know what to do. The force of the flood was beautiful. It would know what to do.
Ellie Pierson (she/her) is the 2025 Outstanding Graduate of Western Washington University’s Creative Writing program. She has been published before in Jeopardy Magazine — Issue 59, with her creative nonfiction piece “Self Portrait as a Child of Flight“. Ellie looks forward to a life full of writing and telling stories that need to be told.