By Liz deBeer
After a night of winds whooshing, windows rattling, rain knocking, sirens shrieking, and wires crackling, complete quiet clutches me. I’m wondering if I’ve lost my hearing when a low creaaaaaak interrupts the silence.
I shouldn’t do it, I know better, but I rush to a window to watch the slow-motion decent of an old Oak smashing through my garage with a thunderous thud, my whole house convulsing; lamps, artwork, bookshelves crashing. I hear perfectly now as I scream-shriek-sob out to god-jesus-mary-mohammed-buddha-any-higher-power-out-there-amen.
Tentatively, I peek into the living room: only a round table and a single chair are upright. Mother’s mirror, Grandma’s china, family framed photos all jumbled together on my heirloom Persian rug.
Can’t move. Can’t react. Can’t process. Can’t cope.
So much. Too much.
Now it’s my own body shuddering, shaking, squeezing out drops, flooding my face, the storm swirling inside, breaking bits of me.
Exhausted, I drop into an intact chair, run my finger on the table’s curved edge, the repetitive motion consoling me as the childhood ditty ring-around-the-rosie plays in my mind.
But what if we didn’t all fall down?
The rubble transforms like an optical illusion as I pick up pieces, placing a triangle of mirror here, a china shard there. Trancelike, my fingers create, pushing scraps on the table, forming a blob, then a rudimentary heart.
A heart? God, no. I scramble the shape, searching for something that better fits my mood, morphing the broken bits into a glittering composite question mark.
Staring into the mosaic, fragments of my face reflect back in mirrored pieces. I should push myself away, start cleaning up debris, but I can’t I can’t I can’t.
Shaken. Grieving. Enraged. I grasp a cracked wooden picture frame and smash it on the floor. I retrieve it, about to slam it down again when I realize it’s split into long narrow rods. Holding one in each hand, my vision shifts again. After grabbing glue from the kitchen, I pluck apart the question mark, pasting pieces to the lengths of frame fragments to create mosaic garden stakes.
I picture them in the ground, shimmering in the sun, shining slivers of encouragement as I replant and rebuild. They’ll look beautiful when bulbs and birds return. But the stakes will need time to dry before I can put them outside. They won’t be ready right away, and neither will I.
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Liz deBeer is a teacher and writer with Project Write Now, a writing cooperative based in New Jersey. Her latest flash and CNF have appeared in Switch, Lucky Jefferson, Bending Genres, Every Day Fiction, Sad Girls Diaries, Libre, and 10×10 Flash Fiction. She has written essays in various journals including Brevity Blog and New Jersey English Journal. She holds degrees from University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University. Liz’s website is www.ldebeerwriter.com.