This is the third text I'm translating from Russian via German to English. You can find CocoPop's text here. The original text is written in the first person singular and as I want to stick with the style, keep in mind that the story's protagonist is CocoPop and not me.

Staying Alive

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in the summer of 2005, I was, unfortunately, one of those who had to be evacuated overnight. My girlfriend at the time was living at the other end of the city with her mom. Liz knew that her mother's health wasn't good and thus decided to take her out of the state of Louisiana as soon as possible to not cause her any harm.

The strange thing about tornadoes is that as early as one day before the storm is going to hit the coast, all birds and bees foresee it and suddenly disappear. The absence of the bees is barely noticeable, but the world seems unearthly without birds, simply too silent. On precisely that day, I helped Liz load her stuff into the car and when we finished, we realized that her dog, Rocky, was nowhere to be found. She called for him and shouted as loud as she could, but it seemed as if the dogs had also disappeared. In the end, she had to leave with a heavy heart without him. The same day, I also traveled to Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana, and Liz and I didn't see each other for six weeks until the urban administration started allowing residents to return.

I was lucky — my apartment was in a part of the city where there hadn't been any flooding. But when I met Liz at the airport two hours after my return, she told me that she feared that her neighborhood might still be under water and had literally turned into a swamp. I immediately hired someone with a boat who took us there, and to our horror, it turned out that the house was still under water. At that time, the water was already eight meters high. Our last hopes dissolved and Liz began to realize that she had lost everything. When we came closer to one of the windows, we saw a sofa floating in the living room and Rocky was on that sofa. He wasn't moving, and we prepared for the worst. But as soon as Liz called his name, he opened his eyes, barked and began to run from one end of the couch to the other. When they finally brought him out of the house, he sprang into her arms and howled nonstop for five minutes.

When the storm was over, Rocky had swum to the flooded house and sat on the roof until the water receded. Then he swam through a window to the inside of the house and dragged a bag of dog food onto the sofa and ate just enough every day to stay alive.

\\ Sources

• Image by Ulrike Mai on Pixabay