Elizabeth D. Jennings
the news called it a 5.3
The floor moves.
Steam fogs the mirror; wet slicks my hair against my skull; there are shampoo bubbles I haven’t washed out; my body is fleshy and animal; I am a bag of meat and bones and blood; a spongy layer of skin prevents all my vital bits from splatter-ing across
the tile floor;
the floor
that is swaying under me; moving; buildings arent supposed to do that; they’re supposed to be brick|steel|concrete|stable|firm structures; I am naked; it’s impossible to be more unprepared for a situation; is this a situation it feels like a situation; I remember earlier this year an apartment building in this city fell during an earthquake and over a hundred people died and it made international news and I heard about it on the other side of the world, and now I am in this city in an apartment building just like that one aren’t I; I turn off the water; I can’t think of anything to
do; there is nothing ;
if the moving-swaying-shaking becomes more and resonances or some shit happens and the buil
ding fa
ll s then
there is nothing
to stop my fragile-animal-meat-bag of a naked body from burst|ng and popp:ng and sm-ea-r-- -i-ng
across the rubble so I start tocount; it feels slow, a
num
ber per heart beat per sec -
ond . I count calm meas
ured num -bers and get to twen
ty. Then the floor is still again so I turn the water back on and get the shampoo bubbles out of my hair. After that I go to curl on top of the hard pallet that I sleep on and I cry.
Elizabeth D. Jennings is a math teacher from Northwest Arkansas. She is the kind of person who cries while watching Ice Age and occasionally—but not habitually—rescues worms from the sidewalk after it rains. Elizabeth’s work has also been published in January House Literary Journal; you can find her at elizabethdjennings.com.