The Saltwater Cradle

Another self-contained short story. Unlike other pieces I’ve shared recently, this is not intended as a horror story though it does have some weird and uncanny elements. “Magical realism” may be a helpful way to frame your expectations.

Content warning: Coarse language, oblique references to sex and abortion. No, the dog doesn’t die.

“Life, uuuuh, finds a way.”

– Michael Crichton via Ian Malcom via Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park

I stepped outside this morning to discover what appears to be a tide pool in our front yard. It definitely wasn’t there when I walked out to the car yesterday morning, and as far as I can tell it had no business being there at all.

We — that is to say I, my girlfriend Cheyenne, and our dog Pug (who is not a pug) — live in the firmly landlocked southeastern corner of Washington state, hundreds of miles from the coast in an area that is technically high desert. Whenever I venture to other parts of the country and tell people where I’m from, I always enjoy blowing their minds with the revelation that, geographically speaking, only about a third of Washington is anything like what they picture. The trees and damp and hipsters make up a minority (although the hipsters have admittedly encroached inland), and much of the state is in fact covered with sagebrush and bald hills.

All of which is to say that a tide pool in the front yard is not a natural landscaping feature. And I’ve never heard of one being installed artificially, though come to think of it I’m sure someone somewhere has done it. But that someone isn’t me, nor Cheyenne. I don’t think it’s Pug either, but honestly who knows. There’s a goddamn tide pool in the front yard, so I guess anything is possible now.

When I first opened the front door this morning, I immediately noticed the brackish, unmistakable smell of seawater. I sucked in a deep breath upon recognizing it, feeling suddenly derailed. This was a “vacation in June when I was fourteen” smell, not a “going to work on Tuesday at age twenty-nine” smell. Stepping off the porch, I scanned the street and the front yard, trying to figure out the source. I then happened to look down at my feet, just in time to avoid stepping in it about five feet from the driveway.

I stopped in my tracks and stared: a gaping divot had suddenly appeared in the lawn. It was a jagged sort of diamond shape, maybe four feet long by two feet wide. The grass marched happily up to the very lip of the hole, flat and undisturbed, and then just gave way to tranquil clear water maybe two feet deep.

I’ve aerated the front lawn a couple of times (yes, really) without any problems, and there’s never been any evidence that it sits atop a bunch of boulders. Yet the walls of the pool were rock — a few porous, rounded basalt bellies that ensconced a tiny ecosystem. The stone gave way to a sloping floor of sand, embellished with rubbery clusters of brown kelp. A couple small anonymous fish darted in and out, miniature dirt-colored koi — things that I had seen dozens of times before at the beach but never did the research to identify. Gravelly lumps that I immediately recognized as shy anemones were spattered all around, a few wide open and flaunting their stubby jade fronds for all the world to see. Trundling along the sand floor was a little orange crab about the size of a silver dollar.

I gawked at the whole thing for about a minute, then turned toward the door, about to go get Cheyenne and ask her about this new… landscaping feature. But I stopped myself. Bringing someone else into this would confirm that I thought the thing was real, and I guess I wasn’t entirely convinced of that yet.

Not that I had any good alternative hypotheses in mind. “Hallucination” didn’t sit right. And if it were a practical joke, I just… didn’t get it. A tide pool felt simultaneously too vivid, specific and mundane to be either a delusion or some ornate prank.

So I just went back to staring at it for a minute, until the little crab made his way to one end of the pool and shimmied into a crevice. I blinked twice, looked away, rubbed my eyes and looked back. The pool was still there. One of the fish flitted into some kelp. A couple of bubbles up to the surface from somewhere.

I shook my head and walked over to the car. The thing didn’t seem to pose any immediate problems, so I decided not to worry about it. I’m good at ignoring things like that when I have to.

When I got home, there was Cheyenne in the yard, staring down at it. Pug was with her, whuffing and bobbing around the pool, periodically crouching at its edge with her nose down and butt in the air. It struck me that her vision must be better than I thought if she was able to see the little critters under the water and get this worked up over them. This is a dog known to be spooked by windblown plastic bags, after all.

“Hey babe, uh… what’s this?” Cheyenne asked, pointing down at the pool and grimacing.

“Ah. Yeah, saw that this morning when I was leaving,” I replied, drawing up next to her and feeling a little woozy.

“Did you… uh. Hmm.”

“I know.”

“Is it…?”

“A tide pool?”

She looked at me, squinting, and nodded.

“I mean, yeah, looks like it,” I admitted. The matter-of-fact nature of my response confused me as much as it likely confused her. I felt a bit disassociated from everything.

She looked back down at it. “The fuck’s it doing in our yard?”

“No idea.”

“Should we…” She trailed off.

“Call someone?” I supplied.

“Yeah, I mean… I guess?”

“Who would we call?”

“I dunno. The 811 guys?”

“You mean the dudes you call before you dig so you don’t blow up a gas line?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would we call them?”

“I mean, if anyone would know about weird shit underground, wouldn’t they?”

“Oh.” She had a point. “Maybe.”

We went back to staring in silence. I couldn’t see the crab anywhere, but the little dirt-koi were still zipping around, much to Pug’s perturbance. A few more of the anemones seemed to have bloomed. A big fat one in particular that I hadn’t noticed before lurked in a corner. I scanned from there to the other end of the pool where I saw a wrinkled lump of mottled purple with a couple smaller lumps tapering off of it, peppered with tiny white pinpoints.

“Woah. Is that a starfish??”

“Oh yeah. That guy bunched up in the corner there?” She pointed where I was looking.

“Yeah.”

“Guess so. Was he not there this morning?”

“I mean, maybe, but I didn’t notice it. You seen the crab yet?”

“No. There’s a crab?”

“Well, there was one this morning.”

“Huh.” She was intrigued, and squatted down to peer more closely into the pool’s depths. Pug trotted up next to her, whining a bit. Cheyenne reached over and tousled her ears, shushing her, staring fixedly into the water. The dirty koi — there were four or five of them total, I figured — were either out of sight or sitting motionless on the sandy floor. Pug stared in anticipation at one that was hunkered down square in the middle.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the little fish zipped into a bundle of kelp. Pug lunged at it with a bark, slipped a bit on the edge and dropped one paw into the water with a comical plunk! I stepped back, feeling a disproportionate rush of adrenaline.

“Hey girl!” Cheyenne yelled.

The ripples from Pug’s intrusion slopped over to the far corner of the pool, and my mouth literally dropped open as several chunks of the lawn on that side sloughed off and splashed lazily into the water, extending its reach by a couple of feet. As they did so, water surged seemingly from beneath them where there should have been just dirt, filling up the new space. As the chunks of sod drifted down into the water, I saw that the stone walls extended along this new addition to the pool as well — more basalt boulders where, again, there should have just been dirt.

I realized that both Cheyenne and I had lunged backward from the pool, nearly to the front door, while Pug stayed at its edge barking like a maniac. My mouth was dry, and I was suddenly feeling afraid. Cheyenne snapped out of it sooner than I did.

“Pug! Pug!” she hollered. The dog kept barking.

“Goddammit — PUG!!” She clapped and whistled, and finally the stupid dog looked back sheepishly, licked her chops — then resumed barking.

“Fine,” Cheyenne muttered, then marched over, grabbed Pug by the collar and awkwardly heaved her over to the front door. Our dog lacks self-control but is easily made to feel guilty, so she went along; reluctant, her barks stuffed back down into peevish whines. I heard the door slam, and I was alone staring at the pool again.

That didn’t last long. My previous attitude — which I guess was bemused perplexity — had now given way to genuine unease, especially when I noted that the stone walls of the pool on its newly expanded far side were already festooned with anemones. Had they just been waiting there already, underground for God knew how long?

I mentally slapped the thought away as soon as it arrived, and turned to follow my little family back inside.

I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about owning a house when a lot of my friends from college are still slumming it in urban apartments, but at the same time — don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right? And this house had definitely seemed like a gift horse, at least when I got it.

In fairness, my whole life has been a bit of a gift horse for a while now. Upon graduating from UW with a bachelor’s in computer science, I spent several years hanging out in Seattle with a couple of school buddies. We each scrounged for about a year, eventually landed fairly solid tech positions, and settled into that urban millennial groove you keep reading about. We weren’t jet-setters, but made enough to afford under-utilized gym memberships, keep up with loan payments and patronize many of the weed startups blooming at the time.

But then an uncle over on the east side — of the state, not the city — put my name in for an analyst position with Lockheed Martin, and even I was kind of startled by how easily I left Seattle behind when a better opportunity showed up. Richland is no bustling metropolis, but it’s a medium-sized town that’s anxious to prove itself, and honestly I’m not that hard to please. Since I’d had the good fortune to land a tech job with a military contractor, while also avoiding the draconian costs of urban living, it wasn’t long before I realized that I could actually afford a mortgage. And around the same time, I met Cheyenne.

She also worked at Lockheed, as a secretary in PR and Advocacy, though we actually met on Tinder. We slept together the second time we went out, and I was relieved to find her friendly but not overly cuddly or affectionate the next morning. She didn’t have big expectations, and neither did I, and things just continued like that. When the bungalow on Winslow Street eventually came across my radar, she offered to help with mortgage payments and join me there when her current lease expired. I liked the idea.

I think we were both aware of the fact that we were approaching something that would be “a big step” for most couples in a rather casual way, and I think we were both happy to be doing so. I made an offer on the place; it was accepted, I dipped a bit into savings for the closing costs, and she moved in several months later. Pug came along as part of the deal. Rehabilitating the tired front lawn became a pet project of mine that first spring, and I never got any indication that a patch of displaced ocean was right underneath it.

Now, sitting on the sofa and gazing absently into the dead gas fireplace, it occurred to me that I was feeling something I hadn’t felt in a long time — perhaps not since college. A sense of overwhelm; an inability to respond to something that nonetheless demanded my response. My front yard was apparently falling into the sea, despite the sea being three hundred miles away. I glanced over to Cheyenne as she stood with her palms planted on the kitchen island, staring at its blank granite surface. It seemed she was feeling something similar.

“So, what are we going to do about that?” she asked.

Time to respond, I decided.

“Well…” I faltered. “I guess the first thing would be to call the… city zoning authority.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“You know, the guys who issue building permits, the surveyors, whatever,” I continued. “Tell them we’ve got an… abnormality in the front yard, see what they know about it.”

“You think they’ll know?” she pressed.

“More than we do, yeah,” I clipped back.

“I don’t think they’ll have any idea,” she replied, standing back from the countertop and wandering over to the fridge. She opened it and pulled out a grapefruit La Croix that I knew she would abandon someplace random, half-finished.

“I mean, if you want to pull out the shop-vac and just try sucking up the water, guess that’s worth a shot.” I surprised myself with that — sarcasm is far from my first language.

She glanced at me and took a slurp from the can, her expression inscrutable.

“Fuck it, may as well,” she deadpanned after a moment, striding in the direction of the door to the garage. I sighed.

A loud tack tack tack sounded from the window behind me and I jumped. Pug immediately started barking again; I heard Cheyenne fire an exasperated curse at her, and the garage door slammed. Swiveling, I found a dirty grey seagull perched on the windowsill outside. It appeared to be looking directly at Pug, who had settled for low growls for the moment.

The damnable bird cocked its head, then nailed the window with its beak again, hard. I had the sudden (absurd?) fear that it could drill right through the glass if it really wanted to. Pug erupted into more barks. Suddenly I was out the door, that brackish scent filling my head again, the stupid seagull flopping away with one of its species’ trademark honking caws.

“Fuck off!” I shouted after it, although it had already fucked off. Mostly.

It drifted down in the middle of the road, padded around a bit on rubbery flat feet, then stopped and looked at me. It cawed again and fluttered its wings. I yanked a pebble out of Cheyenne’s succulent planter next to the door, lobbed it at the bird, missed by a mile and went back inside.

Cheyenne made good on her word and spent a solid hour attacking the pool with the shop-vac, after which point I finally decided to stop being a dick and go check on her. Poking my head out the door, I was shocked to find that my snarky suggestion had worked — the driveway and its surrounding gravel were soaked in seawater, while the pool itself was nearly empty. The kelp hung and flopped about in bedraggled heaps inside it, and the anemones had been reduced to puckered pimples on the rocks. And there she was, on her knees at the edge of the lawn: jeans sodden, hair in bedraggled blonde curtains, sucking up the last puddles at the bottom as the vacuum gargled in protest.

Eventually she started hitting wet sand and got to her feet. She met my gaze briefly — a look of coquettish triumph that left me feeling both cowed and turned on — and switched off the vacuum with a somewhat theatrical flick of her wrist. She turned to me and raised her eyebrows.

“So,” she began.

“So,” I responded, feeling a sheepish grin creep across my face.

“What do you think?”

“I think… that I’m impressed,” I replied. “I was kidding about the shop-vac.”

“Well,” she said, gesturing at the emptied pool, “this is what you get for making careless jokes.” She stepped onto the porch next to me, her face straight but eyes alight. She started wiping her hands together to clear off some of the muck, then suddenly smeared them down the front of my shirt. I leapt backward.

“The hell?!”

She laughed openly. “Don’t underestimate me again,” she said merrily, ducking past me through the doorway.

“Hey, woah.” I trailed her in and grabbed her wrist. “Listen…”

What was I wanting to say?

“I’m…sorry for being bitchy.”

“Oh?” I could see her formulating another mischievous jab, but then her look softened. “Apology accepted.” She curled into my chest and looked up at me, eyes bright. The ocean smell clung to her. I liked it. I fished around for the door with one foot and swung it shut.

“You smell like low tide.”

“Mm. Delicious, I know.” She craned upwards and kissed me, kept kissing me, then worked her fingers into my belt loops and started tugging me toward the couch.

“Oh. Okay,” I laughed between kisses, and wrapped my arms around her. She kept stepping backwards, and I kept following. Her hand went for my fly.

“You sure you don’t wanna shower or…?” I began, but she stopped my mouth again.

“Mm-hmm.” Her arms locked around my back and I tipped forward; she yelped as we both fell onto the couch. It occurred to me to worry about the upholstery. Then it occurred to me to be surprised that she wasn’t worried about it. And then I stopped worrying about it.

“Are you just gonna vacuum it all up?” Cheyenne demanded. Daryl — according to the embroidered patch on his blue collared shirt — just blinked at her for a moment before responding.

“Uh, I mean yeah, that’s basically the procedure,” he faltered.

“Ok — but see, that’s what we did yesterday,” she pressed.

“Uh, I…” He turned and looked down at the pool as if to make sure it was still there. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it was full yesterday, we sucked out all the water with a shop-vac, and now it’s full again.”

“You mean it refilled?” Poor Daryl.

“Yup. So I dunno if sucking it up is gonna fix it.”

“Well, ok.” He paused, strategizing. “We usually come in for, you know, a standing water situation, but it sounds like you might have an ongoing leak in this case. Maybe a broken irrigation line.”

“You ever seen an irrigation line spit out a starfish?”

Poor, poor Daryl.

“I mean, no, but — ”

“Listen babe, he’s right,” I interjected. “That’s not his job.”

Cheyenne glanced at me and then gazed at the pool, which was right back to how it had been twenty-four hours before. Except this time there were multiple small crabs running around in it — three, maybe four, I couldn’t be sure.

“Well, who do you suggest we call instead?” she asked. It wasn’t clear whether the question was directed at me or Daryl. I looked at him expectantly.

“Um… there’s a landscaping firm in Kennewick you could try. Bella Terra; they got irrigation technicians who might… I dunno…”

“Ok, we’ll try giving them a call,” I said. “Thanks for coming out; sorry if we wasted your time.”

“Not a problem,” he said, taking my cue and circling back around toward the driveway. “Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

“No worries.” I politely followed him a few steps then stopped at the edge of the lawn to see him off. As his van chugged away, it revealed a seagull — the seagull? — sitting on the opposite curb. It watched the van’s progress for a moment, then looked at me — at me, I was sure of it.

I bent and grabbed a pebble without thinking, a sudden bubble of rage forming in my gut. The creature looked so nonchalant, almost insolent in its trashiness.

“Bite me, dirtbag,” I muttered, and cocked back with the rock.

“Mark!” Cheyenne yelled from behind me. “Don’t do that!”

I looked back, confused at her outburst. “It’s just a bird.”

“Exactly! It’s just a bird! Leave it alone.”

I raised an eyebrow and walked back toward the tide pool, still holding the pebble. I gave the seagull a sidelong glare as I did so, just in time to see a second one alight next to it.

“Didn’t know you cared,” I said to Cheyenne.

“What, about beating up on animals?”

Jesus Christ, this woman sometimes.

“I wasn’t beating up on anything! Just trying to scare it off.”

“Ah,” she said, cocking an eyebrow back at me. An irritable spark danced beneath her teasing expression — she wasn’t convinced.

We found ourselves standing and quietly regarding the pool for what felt like the umpteenth time.

“What if we… just left it?” she asked after a moment.

Interesting. I found that I didn’t hate the idea. But I didn’t quite like it either.

“I mean, it doesn’t seem to be hurting anything,” she continued. “It’s weird, but…”

“Yeah,” I breathed.

“It could just be our unique gardening feature.”

I scoffed. Then hmmed.

“Guess that would be the most affordable option,” I acknowledged.

“There you go,” she said, giving me a teasing pat on the shoulder. “Big-brain time.”

“You know it. We could even charge admission for people to come see.”

Something still bothered me, however. I turned the pebble over and around in my fingers, remembering Pug’s episode yesterday. What if I stepped outside tomorrow morning to find that the pool had gotten bigger? Doubled in size? Consumed the entire front yard? I pictured the whole lawn suddenly giving way to saltwater and boulders.

I held my breath and tossed the pebble at the pool. As it arced toward the mirror surface I heard, or felt, Cheyenne gasp next to me.

The pebble broke the mirror in the center with an artful plunk, sending ripples outward and water upward. I could almost hear the individual droplets fall back at the end of the splash, and then it was just ripples going out, out toward the edge of the pool.

They lapped up, licked the spare blades of grass that hung over the edge. Cheyenne grabbed my arm.

And nothing happened. One mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi…

And still nothing. We both exhaled. The ripples slowed, lowered, and after about a minute the surface was still again.

“Well,” I began. “I guess if you’re okay with it, I’m okay with it.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “I think I’m okay with it, for now.”

“Okay then.” We shrugged, laughed and went back inside.

That was about two months ago. Our hope that the pool would turn out to be just a harmless oddity was largely fulfilled, though we took pains to keep Pug from getting within dunking distance of it again.

It neither grew nor shrank, and the water level remained constant. But there were a few instances when I’d hear a gurgling rush from outside while sitting in the living room, not unlike the sound of a toilet flushing. When I stepped out to investigate, I found the surface of the pool see-sawing back and forth with miniature waves. But the water eventually settled each time, the dirty koi and crabs reemerged, and stasis appeared to be restored.

In fact, the stasis of life in general was more or less restored. And then one morning I heard Cheyenne groan from the bathroom -

“Oh Gaaaaaaaaaawwd…”

Her voice needled into my drowsy brain and I poked my head up above the duvet.

“Babe?”

No response. I tried again, the image of tentacles coming out of the toilet suddenly vivid in my mind’s eye.

“Shay? Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I’m just…”

Then the sound of vomiting. I bounded out of bed and to the bathroom door.

Finding it unlocked, I poked my head in and there was Cheyenne kneeling over the toilet, eyes closed and shuddering. Her back arched and she heaved again. Crouching next to her, I hesitantly wrapped an arm around her, unsure if she wanted the contact. After a moment she exhaled, swallowed and wiped her mouth with the back of her arm.

“God. Sorry.” She slumped to the floor, leaning against the tub.

“Hey… it’s okay.” I rubbed her bent knee. “You all done?”

She nodded slowly, eyes still closed. A rod of white plastic was cradled limply in her left hand. For an instant I was confused, thinking it was her toothbrush.

Then I realized what it was, and felt all the sleep-muddled thoughts drain out of my mind. I don’t know how long I was staring at it, but eventually I realized that her eyes were open again and looking at me. I tore my eyes from the pregnancy test and focused them on her face.

“So, yeah… it’s positive, in case you were wondering,” she muttered with a dry chuckle.

“Oh…” My brain whirred, trying to see if this added up. It didn’t.

“But how…? You’ve stayed on the pill, right?”

“Of course I have,” she snapped, then immediately softened. “Sorry.”

I just kept absently running my hand over her red knee.

“It’s okay,” I said again from miles away. I closed my eyes and saw dapples of sunlight on the inside of my eyelids, as if from the surface of gently rippling water.

Cheyenne reached up awkwardly for the toilet handle and flushed. She looked at me, eyes tired. There was a weakness, an uncertainty in her face that I wasn’t accustomed to. The whirring in my mind slowed, then stilled. My thoughts flattened.

“Listen, we don’t need to figure this out now,” I said. She nodded slowly in response. “Do you want to try and sleep?”

Another slow, weary nod. I stood, taking her hand, and helped her up.

We crawled back into bed. She curled up against me, and after a few minutes I felt her breathing draw down into a slow rhythm. The grey morning light settled over us like another blanket, and I soon drifted off myself.

A week later, I was at the bar in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal when Cheyenne’s phone started rattling excitedly against the granite. I picked it up.

“Cheyenne’s phone.”

“Hi, this is Gabbi at Richland Lifestyles Clinic,” a cheery feminine voice announced. “I’m calling to confirm an 11:30 appointment for Cheyenne Escalera?”

“Ah, yeah, thank you. She’s in the shower at the moment, but she’ll be there.”

“Ok, great! We’ll see you guys in a little bit then.”

“Sounds good; thank you.”

I hung up, bemused at Gabbi’s use of “you guys.” Did the clinic brief their staff on identifying the boyfriends involved based solely on voice? How many women visited the clinic unaccompanied on a given day? Had Cheyenne ever had to go to Lifestyles or a similar place before? Alone, perhaps?

I pictured her sitting by herself in a cool blue waiting room, thumbing through a back issue of People or Time and trying not to think about the fact that she was about to go under the knife, at least in a sense. I felt strangely grateful that, this time at least, it didn’t have to be that way. I’ve been a dumb prick to her in many respects, but I was here at this moment.

Hopefully it made a difference. I couldn’t be sure.

I got up from the bar and walked my empty bowl over to the sink. I heard the distant gurgles coming from the front yard again and discovered that the sound didn’t alarm or anger me. It was becoming familiar, like a stray cat that keeps appearing at the back door. At first its yowling is an intrusion, but after a time it becomes somehow companionable.

The gurgling sounds faded, replaced by the gurgle of the drain as I rinsed away the soggy remains of cereal. The stairs creaked, and I looked over to see Cheyenne coming down, head cocked to one side as she massaged her damp hair. I searched her face for any sign of nerves or uncertainty, but found nothing.

A knot in my chest loosened a bit, one that I had only been dimly aware of before. If she’s okay then I’m okay, I realized.

“Hey you.”

“Hey yourself.” She sauntered over to the cabinets and pulled out a glass.

“Donnie gave you the rest of the week off?” I asked.

“Yeah. We’ll see if I need it,” she said, filling the glass from the filter pitcher.

“I mean, if I were you, I’d just take it whether I need it or not.”

“Well, I’m not you,” she ribbed, leaning on the countertop next to me. “Not a pansy.”

I staged a glare. “Well, I’m not you either. Not a slave to the corporate machine.”

“Ah.” Her eyebrows went up and she grinned halfway. “Not a… dedicated and conscientious worker, you mean.” She darted a hand out to whack my ass; I narrowly dodged with a whoop.

“Jeez, point taken.” I made for the door and took Pug’s leash down from the coat hooks; upon hearing the familiar clink, the dog lunged up from her snooze by the couch and trotted over to me. As I knelt to clasp the leash to her collar, I looked up and searched Cheyenne’s face again. She caught me.

“What?”

“Sorry. Just…” I trailed off. “You sure you’re okay with doing this?”

She rolled her eyes theatrically. “Yes! I’ll be fine.”

I pursed my lips. It bothered me that she was so averse to me caring about her. And it bothered me that I was bothered by that.

“Mark, listen.” She came up next to me and planted a kiss on my cheek. “I appreciate your concern. It’s sweet.”

“Just… doing my bit,” I dodged. “Least I can do for knocking you up.”

She chortled. “What a gentleman.” She looked down at Pug, who was excitedly panting through her ever-present dopey dog grin.

“Be sure to leave her in the back afterward. We’ll probably have to take off right when you get back.”

“Will do.” I opened the door, ferried Pug out ahead of me, then headed across the driveway for the next-to-last time.

In the backyard later, I found myself staring anxiously toward a spot near the back fence. A pile of turf lay there that I had torn up a couple days previous, clearing out a patch of lawn for what I hoped would be a small vegetable garden. As I had opened the back fence upon returning from the walk, I could have sworn I heard the gurgling sound again — but coming from the wrong side of the fence. Coming from that back corner, behind the pile of turf.

Pug gamboled about, whipping her favorite rope chewie back and forth. The dog’s obliviousness prompted a twist of worry in my gut. I took two steps toward the back fence — and Cheyenne’s voice drifted around from the front of the house.

“Babe! C’mon or I’m leaving without you.”

I squinted one last time at the pile of turf, looking for — what? A burst of saltwater spray coming from behind it? A seagull taking flight? A crab claw lazily stretching for the sun?

“Alright, alright, coming!” I called back, and turned around, closing the gate behind me.

“Pug’s in the back?” Cheyenne asked as I ducked into the car.

“Yup. Thrashing her chewie around like a small animal she’s trying to kill.”

“Aww. That’s my baby.”

“Soon she’ll be all grown up and eviscerating raccoons on the lawn,” I deadpanned, backing into the street.

Cheyenne grimaced. “Can’t wait.”

“Hey listen, a fur baby is a big responsibil– ”

Then many things happened at once. First my nonsense was cut off by a thunderous cracking sound. Then the car see-sawed as if it had gone over a massive speed bump at high speed, lurching upward and crashing down with axle-twisting force. The back of my head banged against the roof; my vision swam and I felt like I had swallowed my tongue. Cheyenne wailed and choked.

As I refocused to look out the windshield, I saw the roof of the carport buckle, its struts jagging downward like broken teeth. One of them chopped into the sun roof of Cheyenne’s little Sentra with a crinkling thunk. My face felt hot, my head throbbed, and I became aware of Cheyenne sobbing next to me -

“Oh God oh my God holy God…”

Then a rushing sound, a wall of white noise punctuated by heavy crashes and thuds. A plane; a bomb; an earthquake?

I looked past the carport to the house, to the front yard — and my insides melted. The lawn was disintegrating into a crater, a tumbling mess of reddish-brown boulders. Turf sloughed away in lumps from the jagged and pocked basalt surfaces, catching on chalky spiked clusters of barnacles. Water pounded and surged from some unseen source, lashing at what was now the lip of the crater no more than ten feet from us. Thick fronds of kelp as long as my arm wobbled gleefully through the chaos. I realized I was babbling -

“Holy shit holy shit Jesus Christ holy motherfucking shit!”

A horrible metallic screeching began to pulse from under the hood, and that snapped me out of it. I twisted and grabbed Cheyenne by the arm, and she did the same to me at the exact same moment.

“Shay, baby, out of the car!”

She was screaming something herself.

“Pug! Pug’s still back there!”

I felt as if the screeching noise was right inside my brain. “Pug — what? The dog??”

Suddenly Cheyenne had lunged out of the car and was sprinting onto the driveway, which was somehow still intact even as water and briny detritus washed over it in sheets inches thick. The carport’s 4x6 supports leaned drunkenly to one side, the braces at their bases wrenched out of the concrete like mouths all at once awake and screaming. And the woman I loved was running full-tilt into that clusterfuck.

I shoved the car door open and tumbled out, nearly skinning my knees on the asphalt and dimly aware that the car was listing at a weird angle toward the front driver’s side tire. I watched in a haze of horror as Cheyenne sloshed across the driveway, and then sprinted after her.

“Cheyenne! Cheyenne!! LEAVE THE GODDAMN DOG!!”

She leapt onto the porch, wrenched the door open and disappeared inside. I roared in terror and bewildered rage — how long before the house itself began to sag and shatter on top of her? But I followed nonetheless, doing an awkward flat-footed dance across the swirling concrete.

Another THUD burst beneath my feet and nearly knocked me over. The puddle covering the driveway began to suck away toward some unseen drain; from the corner of my eye, I thought I saw the Sentra’s nose suddenly bob upward.

I was nearly to the steps, and then WHUMP! A wave plowed into the edge of the crater and kicked up a wall of spray, dousing me in an instant. Something spined and rubbery seemed to crawl through my hair, over my shoulders; I grimaced and threw my arms in front of my face, still pressing for the door. My feet landed on the porch at last but then flew out from under me, eliciting a bark of pain from my hip and elbow as I fell.

Shuffling to my hands and knees with a splutter, I backed up to the brick frontispiece and looked around, my momentum checked for a second. A thrill of terror shot through my chest as I saw thudding cracks split the driveway’s concrete plane into two, three, six chunks — kknk! kknk! kknk! The intersection of cracks in the middle buckled upward where I had been seconds ago, issuing spray in all directions. First one then another of the fragments upended like the Titanic and dove into the sloshing wreckage.

The Sentra began to follow suit, sliding backward until metal ground against rock and it stopped, half in and half out of the water, its undercarriage apparently hooked on the lip of a concrete tecton. The carport roof seemed to be exploding in slow motion, spikes of split wood flailing and dangling like the branches of a murderous tree. One of the 4x6 pillars gave way with a rending shriek, bashed the Sentra’s rear windshield on the way down, then rolled into the water where it bobbed like a log.

As for my car, it was still askew in the middle of the street and getting repeatedly lashed by spray. Steam boiled from under the hood; a rock dropped in my gut as I realized I’d left the thing running. But judging from how the body sagged toward the front driver’s side wheel, the suspension and probably axel were done for anyway.

As I scanned from that pitiful sight to the opposite end of the yard, I realized that the house was now completely hemmed in by a rocky moat some fifteen feet across, roiling and thrashing as if the Pacific tide itself had burst up from underneath the house. Perhaps the backyard was still intact and would allow us an escape that way — but I remembered that gurgling minutes ago from behind the pile of turf, and the hope died in my throat.

We were trapped. The only thing was to join Cheyenne and the baby (wait no the dog that fucking dog!) inside and hope for the best. The only way out was in.

I scrabbled to my feet with my back against the brickwork, not sure if the porch was actually tilting away from me or if it was just vertigo. I closed my eyes for an instant, sucked in a breath and saw glimmering on the inside of my eyelids like the ceiling of a poolhouse. Then I turned, tore the door open and lunged inside.

I didn’t see her. The kitchen was empty, the back door closed. I bolted towards it in what felt like three steps and wrenched it open. Sure enough, the backyard was also a tempestuous mess, rocks and barnacles and surging seawater right up to the concrete patio. A deck chair was clinging for dear life by its back legs, but there was no sign of either Cheyenne or Pug.

“Oh my God…”

Whirling back inside, I raced along the dining room table and around the kitchen island, calling for her.

“Cheyenne?! Shay?? Baby, where are you?!!” I was almost bawling.

Swear to God, if she’d gone and gotten herself killed or even broken a leg for the sake of that stupid dog, I was going to -

I swung around into the bedroom hallway, took two charging steps, then ate the carpet as I tripped over a misshapen dark lump. A whine and a yelp. Bewildered, I rolled around and was smacked back to the floor as Cheyenne fell on top of me.

“Babe! Oh thank God, Mark, babe I’m sorry!”

My chest melted with relief and I threw one arm around her back, the other one pinned down by her. I felt warm wetness and a snuffling in my ear and quickly turned away from Pug, who whined and lapped at my face with hysterical enthusiasm.

I cradled the back of Cheyenne’s head, rocking back and forth on the floor and dodging Pug’s tongue, when I suddenly realized how quiet it was. Although I’d probably left the front door open, the maelstrom outside seemed far more muted than it should have been. In fact –

I stopped moving and strained my ears, trying to hear past Pug’s whines. I pawed her nose and shushed her.

“What is it?” Cheyenne asked, looking up with fear in her face.

“I don’t know, just…”

Outside I could hear rhythmic splashes, watery thuds and creaking. Something heavy slushed into the water in the backyard — perhaps one of the Adirondacks. But it seemed the tumult had stopped. I listened intently for any sounds of distress coming from the house, but as far as I could tell, inside all was quiet.

“I think…”

“It’s stopped,” Cheyenne finished, breathless.

“Yeah.” There were splashes and distant creaks, as if we were in the lower decks of a boat at port. But no more wall-rending chaos. The sound of the water was now surprisingly gentle where a minute before it had been thunderous. I thought I could make out the keening squawk of a seagull.

Cheyenne sighed and dropped her head on my chest. All at once I remembered the obvious.

“Hey, you ok?” I pushed her head up again and raised my own, scrutinizing her face. At first she didn’t seem to hear the question — her eyes looked through me, far away. “Shay?”

“Yeah.” She squeezed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Yeah, I… I think I’m fine. Just… wow.”

“Yeah.” I dropped my head back down. “Wow.”

“How ‘bout you?” she asked.

I ran a quick assessment. My knee and hip still throbbed from my fall on the porch, and I didn’t feel like I was fully occupying my body. It was as if the horizon had tilted in front of me. But I was unsure how to articulate this and decided it didn’t exactly hurt anyway.

“Um… fine, I think,” I said. Then I remembered something else. “Shay — the dog. Why did you risk your life for this stupid dog?”

“Hey stop!” She smacked my chest. “She was my mom’s, remember? I’m not losing her.”

“Oy.” She was right; I had forgotten about Pug’s larger significance. “Fair, I guess. But like… oy.”

She smacked me again, but laughed a little.

Just the silence and waves for another couple of moments. Then I remembered a third thing. Or rather, I mentioned it. The words left my mouth without me even thinking of them.

“How’s the baby?”

She looked at me and furrowed her eyebrows in confusion, and only then did I realize how nonsensical the question had been. My face flushed. “Sorry, I dunno why — ”

Cheyenne shook her head. “No, it’s ok.” She looked away from me and just considered the wall, pensive. Then she glanced down along her torso, at her belly. I half expected her to repeat my question to it. Finally she looked back up and shrugged, a playful crick in the corner of her mouth.

“I think he’s fine.”

****

Thanks for reading! As with the previous fiction I’ve shared, any and all thoughts you have in response to the following questions would be super appreciated. DM me on Insta or Twitter (@sensoremotor for both) or shoot me an email at powersjf@gmail.com.

How is the dialogue?

• Is it realistic?
• Do the characters’ “lines” indicate something of their character?
• Does Marcus’s “internal dialogue” make sense?

How is the prose?

• Does it give you a clear mental picture of the setting and action?
• Do you ever get confused about where things are spatially?
• Does it get bogged down with unnecessary detail?
• Does it call attention to itself (e.g. w stylistic flourishes or weird word choices)?

How do the characters feel?

• Do their words and actions generally make sense, based on what you know about them so far?
• Are there any instances of behavior that feels confusing, abrupt or otherwise out of character?
• Consider your emotional reaction to the protagonist. Do you find him sympathetic? Amusing? Irritating? Etc.

Overall, how would you describe your emotional reaction to this story? Did that reaction shift at all as the story progressed? Pay attention to how it actually made you feel, not how you think the author wants you to feel.