Natural Disasters

You’re clutching your left side when you arrive home late Friday evening. You bring some of the outside cold with you into the living area of the house. Small traces of snow run along the creases and folds in your coat, and flakes thaw along the fur trim on your hood. Your dress pants are soaked beneath the knee, snow lines the space between your shoes and your socks. Your toes burn and the inch-wide gash on the left side of your forehead continues to bleed. Alexa is making her way down the stairs as you enter. She stops at the sight of you.

You think about what you have left out there, the dark-haired Latina woman propped behind her air bag who was motionless for what seemed like a long time but then began to groan and call out for someone—or something—in Spanish. The front of her vehicle was mangled, like a crushed soda can, and the entire passenger side of your Honda Accord had caved in on impact, the frame twisted into savage metal tentacles that clawed toward you as though summoning you to your death. You had climbed out of the car and cast your eyes over the pieces of shattered glass, spangled in the road’s track marks, iridescent under the streetlights. Having something to focus on had helped the shock subside, and your heart rate had begun to slow as oncoming headlights approached. That’s when you felt a sense of urgency and the need to be home. That’s when you shuffled toward the sidewalk, away from the wreck and its debris, and started on the quarter of a mile left between yourself and the house.

Now that you are home, you remove your gloves. You feel pins and needles at your fingertips as you pull a Swiss Army knife from your coat pocket. The way you lay it on the coffee table—as if it might be the line on your exclamation mark.

You make your way downstairs to the basement bathroom where you remove your coat and clean yourself up a little. By the time you head back upstairs you can hear Alexa ordering Joshua to bed. Her Motorola cell phone sits on the loveseat’s armrest. You pick it up, circle the coffee table and lower yourself onto the sofa. A thin rivulet of blood runs from the saturated Band-Aid on your forehead and seeps into your left eyebrow. Alexa returns downstairs without the will to argue with you, not even after she notices her phone in your hands. She doesn’t speak. She sits on the loveseat across from you, on the other side of the table. She waits as you read a string of flirtatious and sexually suggestive messages that she has exchanged with a man who is not her husband. There are messages as recent as last night. Your calves looked sexy today;-), he writes, and her own response is: Just my calves? ☺.

Listen. To be honest, the two of you have been plastering Band-Aids over an axe wound for years. But, for a brief while, in the beginning, the mess you made had a pleasant air. There you were in line at the university bookstore, a new grad student, disheveled but unperturbed about the tasks ahead. Because it was uncharacteristically warm for a September afternoon in London you were in a Das EFX T-shirt and jeans. She was the stranger in front of you. The one who had managed to successfully pair black Converse high-top footwear with a peach-colored loose-fitting minidress. It was cinched at the waist with a racer back that revealed these fine-looking shoulder blades, if there ever was such a thing. She’d held up the line when it was her turn at the register, so you had stepped in and helped her differentiate between the twenty- and fifty-pence coins she held in her palm. She’d lingered by the counter until you were done and you remember the way she carefully folded...