  I like “On the Flood” because it subtly and matter-of-factly narrates a story that would have been typically treated bizarrely. It starts with a very ordinary situation, that of the speaker being tired and ends with an almost impossible event. Well, one can of course be in flood and can probably survive it. But the situation of the speaker is far different since he is on a mattress, carried by the strong currents of the flood. When you come to think of it, he must have swallowed some really big powerful sleeping pill to not notice that he was in the midst of a flood instead of in a cozy bedroom.
He would have been dead already, in short. The beauty of fiction comes here when the text makes the situation probable, that maybe one can sleep on a bed in a room, wake up one the same bed but this time, floating amidst a turbulent flood. &nbsp; The story tastes sweet. The title starts it, “Sweet Summer,” and candies occur throughout the story, it felt like I was also eating Halls honey-lemon myself. Sweets are mentioned at the very start. Sarah gives Frederick Cloud 9. The dog licks chocolate off Sarah’s fingers. And there’s that wonderful part of Frederick’s breath smelling of Halls honey-lemon. The story also crucially ends with candy, Frederick spatting the Halls away. Even the club’s name, if that really was their name, had Candy in it. Is this story a prelude to a larger, longer love story between Frederick and Sarah?
I don’t think so. I was wondering if this story could become a Chapter 1 in a romantic novel, but I figured it cannot be. It is too condensed for a chapter, for it is itself a story already (yah, we’re talking about short short fiction here).&nbsp; I would have hoped for a longer love story between them, but that is of course already a job for another fictionist. 
