Daddy always said our house was a lemon: all waxy and yellow out front but rotten in the back. We had mold on the porch, black widows under the stairs, and water moccasins in the yard where my brother and I played alligator, slithering through the overgrown weeds with both hands poised like jaws, ready to snap at any second. If our mother dared venture across the yard to pick wild berries, we would chomp down on her elbows until she fed us: warm fruit fresh off the vine, old ginger snaps turned to mush in the humidity. One time, the fridge broke down, and she fed us one improbable thing after another: a pickled herring and green bean casserole, mini pizzas made of ketchup and saltines, and something called “swamp pie,” where she whisked up the remaining milk and eggs into a custard, then poured it into a half-baked raspberry pie. We watched it bubble and set in the oven, our alligator hands eager to clamp down on the bloody-looking fruit. It tasted like that pint of ice cream we accidentally left out on the porch one night: all warm and goopy, so sweet we thought it would turn our teeth soft.

We were insatiable after that. Every new disaster was the perfect excuse for swamp pie. If a hard rain turned the backyard to soup, swamp pie. If a storm snapped the top off a pine tree and dropped it through my bedroom window, swamp pie. If Daddy got drunk one night and drove his pickup into the side of the house, doing himself no lasting damage but cracking the foundation in such a way that the basement flooded not all at once but slowly, over months, until we had to bail the mud out through the window, passing buckets down a line while mosquitoes swarmed around us, injecting their filthy saliva into our faces every chance they got, you bet we demanded swamp pie. We ate it at the tiny kitchen table, alternating between scooping up its innards and scratching our bug bites while mean-mugging Daddy through the window. He was talking to a contractor about prices. What we could afford and what we would just have to endure. We put our basement junk up on cinder blocks, made a game of chasing the silverfish and salamanders that wriggled in wet corners, their tails flashing in the slick.

Then the pipes burst. First flooding the bathroom with the cracked tile and the drain flies dotting the ceiling, their wings pasted in place by steam, then the kitchen, under the sink, while the pie shell was par-baking and my brother and I were crouched in front of the oven, alligator hands at the ready. We squealed when the water seeped out of the cupboard and in between our toes, the grimy nooks and crannies where we sometimes forgot to scrub. Daddy was still upstairs, banging around the bathroom, spitting swear words like sinkwater, so Mama tried to fix it herself, turning taps on and off, on and off, to locate the leak: that place where the pipe was rusted and swollen, the metal flaking off like pastry. My brother scrunched his nose up and said, P.U., P.U., while she wrapped the pipe up like a baby that just kept wetting itself. I splashed him with the floor puddle, kicking water toward him in gritty little waves polluted with bread crumbs and onion scraps, and he fought back, using his cupped hands to aim the water at my face. This would’ve escalated into all-out war if the faucet hadn’t exploded.

Water rained down around us like it did that one summer a neighbor tapped a hydrant and let all the children run through the spray until the sun sank down behind the sweetgum and fireflies popped up out of the bluegrass, their butts so bright we thought they looked like candies. Mama hollered for Daddy to get down here before the whole house flooded. My brother and I screamed with joy, slipping and sliding around the kitchen like it was our own private water park. We filled our bargain basket squirt guns with sinkwater, dammed the crack under the basement door with old beach towels, and held umbrellas over the counters so Mama could whisk up the custard and pour it in the pie pan. Once everything was in the oven, we started chanting, “Swamp pie! Swamp pie!” and waving the giant umbrellas around like shields, as if they could protect us.

When Daddy hollered at us to shut our goddamn traps already, my brother said we should build a fort with the umbrellas, layering the translucent panels over each other, until we were like two caterpillars in a cocoon, wondering what the world would look like once we emerged. Mama said something like, I told you not to yell at the kids anymore, and Daddy muttered, Maybe if you stopped coddling them I wouldn’t have to shout to be heard, then she snapped at him, Oh, we can all hear you just fine; everyone in town knows our business thanks to you, but I lost track of their argument because a glittery beetle with a back like an emerald crawled up my brother’s leg, seeking shelter from the flood. I wanted to trap it and put it in a jar, but my brother shielded it from me as if the beetle were a part of himself, one of the little tender bits we only let each other see when our parents were fighting, so I relented and told the beetle not to worry—we would shield it from the storm. When this was all over, we would go out and hide in the jewel grass, wait for the other beetles to rise up out of the muck and grace the world with their beauty.

Any minute now, I said. The pie was almost ready.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson