An earthquake struck the day Baz Bryant’s mother left, packing her bags and disappearing on a bus heading out of town while her son was in school and her husband was passed out drunk on the couch. Sitting at his desk in his grade 8 science class, and half-asleep under the hypnotic spell of the teacher’s droning voice, Baz wasn’t sure what exactly was happening when his desk began to sway underneath him. He sat up straight and looked out the window, expecting to see construction on the new arena across the street, but everything over there was still. Around him his classmates were making noises of surprise and fear, and the teacher was forced to raise her voice over their excited babble to tell them to get under their desks. Baz joined his classmates in obeying, but only after one last look outside, where dark clouds had scudded across the blue sky suddenly. For just a moment he thought he saw snow drifting through the hot early summer air, then he ducked under his desk and waited for the shaking to stop.
When he got home—sent home early by the school—the excitement of the earthquake was lost in finding his mother gone without even a note. Unwilling to face his father’s wrath when the man awoke from his drunken stupor, Baz left the house almost as soon as he’d walked in and wandered the streets until dark, when he reluctantly returned home. He tried to sneak past and up to his room but his father caught him at the bottom of the stairs, cuffing him upside the head hard enough to send him to his knees and screaming at him in almost unintelligible snarls. Baz hunkered down and protected his head, waiting until his father ran out of steam and allowed him to escape up to the relative safety of his bedroom.
His life went on, after, and he almost forgot about the earthquake that had disrupted his classroom at probably the same time his mother was getting onto a bus to leave him behind forever. He vaguely heard reports on the radio and on the news over the next two years; reports about earthquakes in other areas, especially those in some place in India, but he didn’t pay much attention to them. He had enough to deal with as he entered high school and dealt with his father’s increasingly violent drinking binges. It wasn’t until a series of earthquakes all over the world, the week before Halloween, that he thought again of that single earthquake and the momentary hallucination he’d had of snow outside in the summer heat.
On November 1st, the world ended.
No comments:
Post a Comment