CRITICA

The bed shudders and rumbles at 12:01 and across the dark my husband says, Did you feel that? I am silent. Earthquake, he says, and I feel his body go taut like the elastic spine of a bungee just before it reaches its limit, before it jerks back up in defiance of gravity and good sense. I think in the moment, Is this it? Could this be it? Is the dry earth ready to suck the whole of me into its groaning middle, and will I wake again? I lie there beneath the sheets remembering the words of my mama so many years ago as she gazed out the kitchen window into the gray loam of our Rust Belt winter, dead grass smashed beneath hard-packed snow. Don’t you go off to California with all the weirdos and the earthquakes. Any day now, she said, it could split off into the sea. And what she didn’t say but I knew she meant – good riddance. But I am here against my pillow, face-down inside my seismic longing, my California, not so much scared of splitting off but simply curious, an observer of all the ways nature might consume me. Fire, drought, this trembling house. We have evacuated, twice. MANDATORY. We have lost power and water, widened our eyes before the heat of monster flame, slept in hotels filled with the displaced, fretted about the eggs rotting in the refrigerator. But here I am. Here we are. Fire, drought, this trembling house. Here I am remembering driving across the plains of Ohio, squeezed between my brothers in the back seat of the Olds, thighs sticking to vinyl, Indiana, Illinois, my father behind the wheel, my mama clutching the door handle pretending to be calm while ahead of us spins a meaty funnel, a twisty thing reaching down from the sky. We have to pull over, my father says, We will crouch down in the ditch together until it passes. Then, too, I was silent as I looked into the distance, wondering what it would feel like to be swept up with the cows and trees, breath stilled by the possibility of an end brought on by natural life. Then, too, I survived. I stretch out my hand to find my husband, verify ligament and bone beneath skin, the proof of us still whole together. I hold onto him. I hold on. Yeah, I whisper. Yeah. I felt it.