Original Art by Kai Smart

On the ceiling directly above her bed was a yellow stain shaped like a boot. If she squinted, the stain could be Italy on a very old map. This was her view most of the time. Her head rested on the worn cotton sheet thrown over the thin scratchy mattress. Her spine was almost perfectly aligned. She lay this way for most of each day, her feet hanging slightly over the edge of the bed. Though it had become routine, she knew this would not be her view for very much longer. Rent was over due — she’d received more than one eviction notice. She paid no attention to these slips of paper; a strong intuition told her that they would be irrelevant soon. It was this strong intuition that told her that her hours of squinting at the likeness of Italy were numbered. Deep within the ground she felt pressure building, the literal pressure of a rock against a hard place and it felt as if tiny strings connected all that rock to her insides. She was weighed down in a way that could not be attributed to gravity.

Of course no one believed her. Some thought her depressed, others delusional. She knew she was just waiting for the inevitable. Everyone agreed an earthquake was coming, but no one needed it the way she did. No one could predict precisely when all the pressure would release. For her, it would be soon, very soon, not soon enough.

Mel had not always been this way. She had been what most would consider a productive member of society, working at the food bank, sorting canned goods and various donated items. She found it easy to like people. She didn’t talk about herself too much. She hoped that someday she might see every ocean from at least some part of each coast, but she knew this might not happen, and it didn’t bother her much. In fact, nothing bothered her much. She had never connected a feeling of loss or outrage to anything larger than herself, and on the occasion she had these feelings at all, they passed quickly and without event.

The day that everything changed, it sounded and felt like a train went by, but everyone knew that there had been no train. There was a brief moment of panic, then things quietly slipped back into their usual hum. The general consensus was that this had happened for the best. It was a small quake- not big enough to count “earthquake”, just a tremor. No big deal. One theory was that little quakes released enough pressure so that everything could go on as usual, for even longer before “the big one” would arrive. Mel knew differently, though she had no formal training in seismology.

And this was the part that was hard to explain; this was the part of the story where people began to look at her funny. But she knew in that moment that the little tremor had changed things dramatically. Things were precarious, the end in sight. It was as if a nerve connecting her eyes to her brain, her brain to her spine or maybe her spine to her hands, were somehow pinched between the plates below her feet. Deep beneath the ocean giant bodies of rock that carried civilization were testing their strength against each other, stubborn and fragile, seemingly immovable and yet somehow moving at an almost imperceptible pace- and some part of her- whichever part- was caught between them. She dropped her cans, and a co-worker picked them up, offering them back to her. They faced one another for a moment that felt long to him until she finally spoke,
“It’s coming.”

“What’s coming?” He extended a thin freckled arm, three cans of green beans precariously balanced on five fingers.

“The big one, it has to, it’s coming.”

“What? No, that was just a little one — don’t worry. They happen all the time. You see usually, they are so small we don’t notice them at all.” He was well intentioned and young. As he went on, she studied his face, his acne pitted skin, a stray facial hair here and there that he’d missed when shaving. She grew impatient and interrupted.

“That one made it worse. I can feel it, it hurts.”

He looked at her for a moment, to understand. Quickly, he gave up.
“Do you want these back?”

From there, Mel’s descent was not slow.

She spent countless days before that, sorting donated cans, making sure that expiration dates had not passed, separating cream of mushroom from cream of celery, placing minestrone with minestrone. She found wonder in the array of foods in a can, from meats to pie fillings, milk, legumes. She pondered how many hands each box or can or cellophane package had passed through to make it to her. This had always consumed her enough to pass the days. She enjoyed it for the most part. All of that changed after the tremor. Her senses worked in ways they hadn’t before, or failed to work the way they had. It was impossible to continue the same routine.

Previously she had concerned herself only with tasks at hand — now even simple tasks were obscured by a certainty that it would all be irrelevant soon. Her work suffered. Thinking that she had been hit by a falling can, management switched her to the less manual task of filling out invoice slips for donated goods. This proved futile as well. The pain or pinch or whatever it was in her nerves could not keep quiet. It bubbled up and came out of her mouth in curious ways, ways that confused the donors who just wanted kind words and proof of donation for tax write-off purposes. She was let go as gently as possible and encouraged to re-apply if at some point in the future she felt able.

Mel did not know why the earthquake had changed everything for her, but it was irrepressible, unmistakable, as if she was looking through someone else’s eyes. She had been dismissed early, and in the absence of her usual ride home, she walked. The familiar blocks between her apartment and the food bank were different than they had been before. She found herself aware of a life held in side of supposedly “inanimate objects”, a term that began to strike her as terribly insensitive. Each naked car wheel missing its stolen hubcap, each lamppost and trashcan had witnessed unthinkable things. Every broken bottle and windowpane, every dirty penny sat waiting for something to change. This new awareness made the outdoors unbearable, particularly the city blocks between her and her home. She tried to make the blocks go by quickly, her speed increasing with each step until she was running. She promised herself that she would wait until it all came to a stop before she left home again. And so the wait began in the quiet of her apartment where her gaze fell on a vase on a shelf. Looking at the vase, Mel became certain that they were waiting together, though perhaps for different things. It was as if together they were holding their breath and she felt grateful for its company.

Mel was right about the vase — for as long as the vase could remember it had felt, deep in the particles of its cool green glass, a longing for the plant on the edge of the bookshelf. The vase loved everything about that plant- the broad, smooth leaves, the shiny black ceramic pot, the soft brown mound of potting soil with its little white specks. There on the bookshelf, the plant drooped pitifully, with one white blossom tilting its weary neck towards the floor. It was thirsty and perhaps lonely, perhaps — and this thought was almost too much to bear- mutually longing for the company of the vase. If the vase could have trembled at this thought it would have. But the vase couldn’t move at all, and so, bound by the laws of physics, it mourned the distance that held it a room’s length from the plant.

The vase — a former bottle of olive oil — was lonely as well, for it held only water. The last plant it held was a bundle of Queen Anne’s lace that Mel picked off the side of the road up North. The stalks- once so fresh, so green, so sturdy- began their natural attempt to rejoin the earth, but alas, as they decomposed they remained confined by the vase. Days went by, making weeks and months as the vase longed to set the dying flowers free. Mel often appeared as still and inanimate as the flowers, the vase, the thirsty plant, the bookshelf. Indeed, it was as though they all sat braced and waiting until the day Mel stood up. She stretched and surveyed the room, pulled the rotten flowers from the vase, and tossed them into the trash. She glanced apologetically at the vase. About fucking time, thought the vase.
Mel opened the window to push her face outside. The air was heavy. The air was still. The waiting bled on to everything in Mel’s gaze. She saw a waiting city below. Cars waiting not just for the light to turn, people in cars waiting not just to get to where they needed to go. She saw people who thought they were waiting only for the end of another day. Mel knew there was much more to come.

The day it came, she was ready. Mel lay on her back, gazing at the Italy stain for what, she knew, was the last time.

It was only a handful of seconds long, but the stages were unmistakable. First the floor let a deep rumbling cough and the bed began to shiver. Everything else joined in. Things without two legs or any legs at all looked as though they were hopping from one foot to the other, almost in a dance. Then, it was as if music swelled and all of the knick-knacks and books, the papers, the ash trays, the lamps and the shoes, the vase and the plant — everything sitting on anything knew it was time to leap into the air. For just a moment, a moment that she will never forget, gravitational force let go. As the creaky wooden beams beneath the second story floor gave out, Mel was suspended in air. The walls and the bed and the windows and her own reflection, stayed where they had always been and in the longest of moments, Mel was aware of just floating.

Of course, everything fell. Some think of this as the final stage, the loudest part, the breaking part, the part of toppling shelves and surface meeting surface in ways they’d never practiced — only imagined. The shelf unhinged itself from the wall and pitched the vase down to the ground. It would have almost certainly smashed, had it not been saved by the leaves of the plant. The nest of thirsty leaves was more thick and lush than the vase had imagined. The leaves grasped the vase, tipping it slightly and pouring its water. Gently they let it drop into the stems and press its weary glass into the soil, now cool and moist.

Mel knew this was the final stage, at last. No silence had ever been quite so silent before. Above her, there was no ceiling, only sky. Outside of her four walls, what remained of the town and everyone in it was ready and waiting, braced for the next movement. Mel, who had been waiting for so long, finally sighed. It was as if the seismic pressure lifted from her chest and she finally, unencumbered, could just breathe.