The Sigma Asset 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)║AMBYS WINNER 2022

41: Tremors

My heart was beating demisemiquavers.

Five seconds more.

My lungs felt like they were about to detach from my insides.

Two seconds more, Zeph.

Doing sprints the morning after getting baked with Will had been a bad idea.

I'd been woken up at five-thirty by a vivid nightmare, where I'd somehow gotten on a plane back home without saying goodbye to Will. In the strange illogic of dreams, Will had been at work when I'd left the house for the airport, but it hadn't occurred to me that I'd never see him again, until I was on the plane. I'd hoped to just call him and explain, but on the K.T.X. home with Eomma I'd come to the heart-shattering realization that Will and I had been inexplicably disorganized enough to not bother to exchange numbers or email addresses, nor did I have Gloria's number, nor the number of anyone who could get me to Will. In the fog of my dream I'd sat on the K.T.X with a painted-on smile and Eomma's hand in mine, utterly crushed, and wracked with guilt for leaving without saying goodbye.

For the rest of the dream I'd comforted myself, insisting that Will was probably relieved that I'd left, but the rising despair that he was gone forever had pervaded the end of the dream, and I'd woken up close to tears. I'd wondered then if Will's paranoid tramadol daydreams were anything like that.

The hurt of losing Will had lingered on until I'd arrived panting at Arenosa Rocks. I wished that I could run to Will's room and wake him, and tell him...what could I tell him? I was gonna be in Korea in a couple of weeks. We'd both move on. Our brief weeks together would need to be enough for us.

Six-fifteen and already the sun was beating down on the bleached boards of the jetty, reflecting yellow glare into my eyes. I blinked where I stood, catching my breath before the run back to the house.

With the calm of closed eyes, I noticed that the only sound around me was my own breathing. It was...weird. Unnatural. The beach air was usually thick with the chirrup of small birds in the scrubby bushes near the rockslide, and gulls and petrels calling to each other as they careened around the bay, but they weren't there. The air was dead, the only sound was the waves crashing on the shore. I'd never heard the beach so quiet before.

A humming slowly filled my ears, low-pitched at first, more easily felt as vibrations than heard as sound. At first I mistook it for a gust of wind, but it got louder and louder.

I opened my eyes and held my hand up in front of me. It was shaking. But it wasn't my body trembling; the ground was shivering beneath me. A tremor.

Shibal.

A surge of waves crashed onto the beach, and the tide receded. Too quickly. It wasn't right. All the time the rumbling vibrations became louder, until the ground did more than shiver. It shook, hard, knocking me to the ground. The Santa Elena Faultline was moving.

Run, Zeph.

I threw myself into a sprint, up the beach toward the trees beyond the jetty, the quake tossing me across the ground every few steps. The wave had receded beyond the shallows, and was rising to a huge crest.

I sprinted harder to the treeline, toppling again and again as the sand shifted under me. Higher and higher, the wave rose to form a colossal breaker that towered over the beach. Brambles and falling branches cut me as I ran, shattering ground around me sending me headfirst into the underbrush twice, three times.

Fucking run, Zeph!

Sun-hardened earth heaved apart as the quake entered a violent peak, throwing dirt and rocks into my path and uprooting trees in front of me. I tumbled deep into the scrub, safe when the great wave broke and the water finally came, a frozen rush of foam across my waist and into the forest, tearing off branches and sending rocks spinning in its path. Phone in my mouth, I clung around a tree trunk as the swell of the wave carried boulders and branches away, the ground trembling on and on.