The Last God of New Orleans

An exercise in fiction.

The rain drummed steadily against the windows of the Café du Monde as I stirred my café au lait, watching the crowds hurry past under their umbrellas. It was early evening, that liminal time when the French Quarter starts to shake off its daytime tourist veneer and settle into something more authentic.

An elderly man sat down across from me without asking. His beard was white and wild, his eyes the exact color of the Gulf on a stormy day. He wore a Hawaiian shirt that had seen better days and khaki fishing pants, but there was something about him that didn't quite fit with the casual attire – a kind of presence that made the air feel heavy with ozone, like just before a lightning strike.

"Mind if I join you?" he asked, though he was already settled in. "Not many empty seats when it rains like this."

I gestured at my half-empty table. "Be my guest."

He ordered coffee and beignets, then sat back and watched the rain with an expression I couldn't quite read – something between satisfaction and sorrow. "You know," he said suddenly, "I've lived in every port city worth mentioning, but New Orleans... she's different. She understands water in her bones."

"You've lived here long?"

He laughed, and the sound reminded me of waves breaking. "Longer than you'd believe. I was here before the French, before the Spanish. Had a different name then, of course. Many different names." He leaned forward, and for a moment I could have sworn I smelled salt water and seaweed. "The Greeks called me Poseidon."

I smiled politely, the way you do at eccentric strangers in the French Quarter. But he didn't smile back.

"You think I'm just another Quarter character," he said. "That's fine. Belief isn't what it used to be, and that's partly why I'm still here. When the old ways started fading, most of my family retreated to Olympus. But I couldn't. The seas were changing – not just with tide and time, but with what humans were doing to them. Plastic in the Pacific. Oil in the Gulf. Dead zones spreading like cancer. I couldn't just... leave."

His coffee arrived, and he took a long sip. "So I stayed. Adapted. Learned to live among mortals. New Orleans called to me because she's a city that lives and dies by water's whims. These people – they understand respect for water's power. They build their houses on stilts, they know how to read the sky, they've learned to dance with floods instead of just fighting them.

"Katrina," I said, the word slipping out before I could stop it.

His eyes darkened, and for a moment they looked like whirlpools. "I tried to stop it. Or at least... lessen it. But my power isn't what it was, and the levees..." He shook his head. "Engineering can fail, but hubris... hubris is what truly dooms cities. They knew those levees weren't strong enough. The Army Corps of Engineers told them so. But money and politics..." He trailed off, staring into his coffee.

"The water came anyway," he continued softly. "Water always finds its way home. I saved who I could. More than anyone knows. But not enough. Never enough."

Thunder cracked outside, and I jumped. When I looked back, his seat was empty. His coffee cup was still there, but it was filled with seawater, a small fish swimming circles inside it.

The rain continued to fall, and somewhere in the distance, I heard the mighty Mississippi rolling past, carrying its ancient secrets to the sea. I left enough money on the table for both our coffees and stepped out into the storm, thinking about old gods and rising waters, and how some cities carry their myths in their very foundations.

The next morning, the news reported that despite the heavy rainfall, the levees had held. They said it was engineering, but I wondered about the old man with eyes like the Gulf, still watching over his chosen city, still doing what he could to keep the water at bay.