The Earth Moved

Under our feet.  Actually, under our beds.  It bobbled the house, the floorboards, the furniture.  Glassware rattled. 

Early, too damn early.  Like hurricanes, why do these things come in the early hours?

Earthquake?  What do you do? 

You need to be outside.  Right.  In case it gets worse and instability takes the house and crumbles around you.  Get everyone up and get outside.  RIght.  Outside.  Where is that damn cat?  Nearby, good, acting a bit odd, but nearby.  Call out to household members in the only words that your mouth can form. 

“Get up.  Earthquake.”
“What?”
“Earthquake!”
“What’s that noise in here?”
“I said, earthquake.  Get up.  Get dressed.  Now.”
“But it might not be an earthquake. It might have been an explosion.”

You listen at the windows.
“There are no sirens. Couldn’t have been an explosion.” Now you are more alert. “Besides, an explosion doesn’t rattle things like this.”

It’s too damn early for this.

 

Graduation Bounce

I noticed it on Monday.  A rustling sensation in my chest that seemed to connect with the lift in my walk across campus. 

I felt it in my mind on Wednesday.  The movement of my thoughts, swirling together like flotsam trapped in the eddies of a flooded river. 

There are words.  Elation.  Distraction.  Confusion.  Eviction. Tension.  Exhaustion. 

Giddyness. 

How to put it together so it makes sense? 

In 22 days I will graduate.  I will be evicted from the life to which I’ve cleaved, communed, reveled in and suffered from for five years.  Darn.  More words.

I feel elated, confused, drained, exhausted, and pensive.  I feel like Alistair Sims as Scrooge, dancing like a mad man after discovering he’s still alive. 

On Thursday I stared at the APA manual, watching the blur of words flicker past as I thumbed for the right citation.  Back and forth I went over the same few pages, ignoring the very page I needed, totally and utterly confused.  The student sitting beside me must surely have judged me an idiot.

Hmm.  That’s a word I don’t care for.

Today, before leaving the Writing Lab, I used words like “Well, I’ve gotta’ go home and get gussied up.”  As if the colloquil expression could strip away the tension.

Grappling with makeup.  Powder, yes.  Cover up stick, yes.  A hint of eyeliner and a pass of the eyebrow pencil, yes.  Blush, no.  Mascara, absolutely not.  The curled hair was already enough fluff.

At the reception this evening, failing to settle into what for me is normal.  Geeky Melissa arrived.  She who bumbles into conversations.  Says things like “Gee, I hate these kinds of things.”  Award things.  Fanfare.  Hoopla.   Knocks over another awardee’s plaque, balanced against the edge of a chair.  The thud of it falling flat drew attention.  But no time to feel sheepish.

One moment stopped my turn towards the stage’s exit.  A hand, palm only, on my back.  Soft voices on either side of me, told me to “wait.”  A face turned to me from the podium.  Quick eye contact and a hand patting the air in front of him.  Do not got yet.  There is more.

And there was more.  Unexpected words that made no sense as a group.  Some I recognized, words that made a personal connection to me amid a flotsam of others.  What?  Who me? 

Can giddiness kill?

Word Banter

As a writer, I’m accustomed to finding new ways to say things.  In fact, we are encouraged to come up with unique language.  “Tell it strange” a professor this semester has often quipped.  But these same, wonderful professors also remind us to tell it plain rather than risk muddling our meaning, and thereby, confusing our readers.

Apparently these recommendations don’t apply to U.S. military leaders.

In a report this week to the U.S. Armed Services Committee, General Dave Petraeus used this phrase to describe the violent conditions inside Iraq:

Ethno-sectarian competition

Hmm.  Shall we break it apart, children, or do we need to?  Nowhere in the report does the General use the phrase “civil war.”  He doesn’t need to.  In military-esque wordspeak, ethno-sectarian competition has replaced it.  I suspect that Petraeus’ speeches are helped along by a team of English graduates, who sit around in their speech-writing room, coming up with clever ways to conceal the truth and confound the public.  Their tenents?  Confuse the facts through the use of words.  Make the language that is pertinent to understanding the situation inaccessible to the average American.  Americans will sit and listen as the jumble of words run together in a mash of intelligent-sounding prose.  They will be unable to decipher them, react to them, and respond accordingly.

Perhaps I should tell my co-horts graduating with English degrees this year, about the exciting job opportunities that might be found.  Just think, I might say, how an English degree can be used to effect U.S. policy?  Or working for the U.S. education system, rewriting textbooks.  Our own Civil War then, becomes:

Regional-sectarian competition

Sounds much better, right?  Here’s some cookies and a glass of milk.  American Idol is on.

Saved Cake

He is blond, young and fresh with childhood.  He speaks to an older woman, probably his grandmother, while with a smooth, white finger he points at a black and white photo, a reproduction from the paper published shortly after the Marting Arms exploded.  A three-tiered wedding cake sits in a window, framed by what’s left of a plate glass window, with only a few broken stands of it at the base of the window.  Across the street from the heart of the explosion, it was, somehow, spared the devastation which took 41 human lives and destroyed a block of the city of downtown Richmond.

“But the glass is broken.  How can the cake be okay?”

The older woman, small and slight, holds her quiet before her.  Old enough to know these things, she pulls her purse closer to her body, hunches her shoulders a bit closer together, and touches him softly on his back. 

“Yes, it is curious, isn’t it?”

She has scanned the photos, the articles.  She has looked at the other photos, seen the movie with her small gaggle of family members.  Reverence gathers in her countenance while sadness and joy at this communal sharing brings something else.  But she doesn’t have time for that, because the boy is pointing again, touching the same photo.

“How can it be okay?”  He looks up at her, his question not quite rhetorical.  He is used to adults answering the questions which he asks.  This one makes no sense in the logic he knows of the world.

She answers again, “I don’t know.  It is interesting isn’t it?”

Resting her hand lightly on his shoulder, she steers him toward the door.  But he continues focused on the same image.  He’s seen the other photos.  The fire, and inferno of blank, black space where moments before, buildings stood.  He understands these things, but not this.

“How can it be like this?  It’s a cake.  A cake. How can it be?”

Indeed.  How can it be.

Flash

At four-o-clock this morning I woke up suddenly, on fire.  I jumped up out of my chair, throwing off my blanket in front of me and my shoulder wrap behind me.  Then I paused for a moment to wake up my other senses and decide my next move.

The trouble was, I didn’t see any flames.  I could not smell smoke.  The house was not on fire.  How then, was I burning?

I ran my hands over my body, feeling the heat.  The skin around my lips felted pulled tight with it, as did the skin on my hands and wrists.  But my hands didn’t register fire.  This was not fire bought on by flame.  Then what?

I began to shiver as the burning continued to dance on my skin.  Yet, even as the inferno raged, I was growing cold.  Sitting back down on my chair, I pulled my wrap around my shoulders.  Leaning forward, I grabbed the blanket crumpled on the floor, fanned it out, and pulled it over my lap and shoulders.  It took some moments for the shivering to stop.  The flames continued.  And then I remembered.

At two-thirty, just before bed, I had taken a tablet of Niacin along with a handful of vitamins and disaster-avoiding supplements.  Not niacinamide, which has the flush removed from it with the “amide” bonded to it.  But the pure stuff.  It had been years since I had gotten that kind of reaction.

Must have been my body’s rebuff for eating pizza for dinner.

And at least it wasn’t a hot flash.  I’m far too young for that.