It hadn’t rained in St. James Parish for eighty-three days. The sugarcane leaned like old men in prayer, brittle and bowed, and the bayou behind the clapboard church had crusted over like a blister. Folks said even the frogs were too thirsty to sing.
That’s when the preacher came.
He wasn’t local—nobody with a pressed white suit and a Tennessee drawl was ever local—but he rolled in with a tent and a banner that read DELIVERANCE CRUSADE: SATAN OUT, SALVATION IN. Folks were dry and scared enough to listen.
Isaac Laveau watched from the back pew. Mute since he was nine, he was used to being the quietest thing in any room. At fifteen, he was rail-thin and sun-darkened, his eyes always somewhere between a stare and a dream. He worked afternoons at the bait shop and spent evenings by the edge of the bayou, sketching birds in a lined notebook he kept hidden under the floorboard. His uncle, who took him in after his mama died, called him a mouthful of nothing and worse behind closed doors.
Most folks in town looked at Isaac with a mix of pity and suspicion. He wasn’t right, they said. Not with those soft hands. Not with those eyes. He never said a word, but people swore they could feel him thinking.
The preacher said the drought was punishment. That God would not return the rain until the parish repented, or until every unclean spirit was named and cast out. He looked straight at Isaac when he said it.
The next night, they brought him to the bayou. The water was gone, but the memory of it lingered—damp rot in the cypress, minnows dried to lace on cracked mud. A circle of men stood with lanterns and Bibles. His uncle clutched his arm like a snake on a stick. The preacher stood barefoot in the dust, shouting about fire and water and sin.
He raised a jug above Isaac’s head, but no water came. Just dust. Just heat.
Isaac didn’t scream, even when the preacher pushed him to his knees. Even when they tried to make the mud a font.
He closed his eyes.
He didn’t pray. But he listened.
And then he felt it: a tremble under the soles of his feet. A pulse. His own, or the bayou’s, he wasn’t sure.
The wind turned. The trees leaned in. There was a stillness like the moment before thunder.
Then, water.
Not a trickle—a swell. The ground split with it. Cypress roots shifted as the bayou came back to life in a single, slow breath. It rose past ankles, knees, ribs. Lanterns floated. The preacher stumbled. Isaac stood.
He did not run.
He let the water rise.
And when it touched his throat, he opened his mouth for the first time in six years and said, clear and steady:
“I am not possessed. I am protected.”
By morning, the tent was gone. The preacher, too.
The church sat silent, its porch warped by the flood. Waterlines stained the trees in pale rings. Mosquitoes buzzed like electricity.
Only Isaac remained, walking the levee barefoot, the cane bowing slightly as he passed.
At the edge of the churchyard, someone had placed a single white lily in a rusted coffee tin. No one claimed to know who left it.
Cory Dale Cart is a queer, neurodivergent writer rooted in the rural South and the Oklahoma prairie. Their work explores memory, faith, and queer survival in overlooked places, often blending lyricism with cultural critique. They are currently pursuing an MFA in Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing at Emerson College.
Modern Flash Fiction 