“Uh… right now?” Gene has just been listening to one of his favorite sounds gifted his apartment. When storms come in from the South, they inevitably cause the oversized lid on the art deco street lamp to clunk under its own loose weight. He liked to leave the door open as the winds kicked up. Hell, he liked to leave the door open to invite the storm inside; yes—for a cup of whoop-ass. That was the pleasure: open the door to the danger, let it come in. For him, the streetlamp had become a kind of novel bell; impending storm coming. She’d probably not even noticed it, he realized, her chin straining up to rest on his spine and shoulder.

“The thing is…”—how to put it—”I don’t want to fuck you while the storm is coming in…”

This is a way-bold statement for their budding relationship and he sees the surprise she can’t hide from her face. Had he said the word “fuck” in her presence yet even? He’d no idea. But her face is not marred by shock; it is genuine uncertainty he sees. He twists his neck around and smiles—nothing menacing here—and she giggles. Then he turns away from the screen door, the clunking of the street lamp, the sky split in half between bright blue and rolling gray, and wraps his arms around her. She lets him take her in and in her way, a way she hopes he notices, she presses her face against his chest and stares thoughtfully at the front moving across their little city. She does like storms that arise, too. He squeezes her and after a nervous breakthrough says, “I want to fuck you when the storm is here—when it’s banging on the windscreen, in full effect.”

She decides to play the straight man, “Oh, I see…”

He squeezes. “You know it.” He bends his head down and quiet, “You better think the storm is me.”

She leans back from him and waves her hand Scarlet before her face. “Oh goodness.”

He won’t live up to it, so he smiles too.

Shara sees the stumble and knows she must recover lust. “I’ll wait for that, you monster.” She waits, his face is creasing in a way that’s coming around, and then she adds, “You fuck me like the front of weather.” There’s a long pause of eye-looking and she adds, “I can’t predict the weather.”

But the weather is coming.

A long time passes in this way, in warm breezes, on this luscious coast; with the pulsing sound of surf and the moon rising higher, until Eric notices that the bay, the edge of it, is far out. The water has receded out to what seems like a hundred yards. In that moment, the calm of the night gives way to an ominous fear; a rare vast and sudden demon. Eric is then on his feet, the balls of which, bare, give no traction as he sprints as hard and as fast as he can toward the boy, who with each breath-stealing stride seems ever farther away. Eric cannot find his breath, though he thinks he is heaving, he feels fleet, as though breathing were unnecessary. Before he knows it he is on top of the little boy, who has lifted up above his shadowed face, the offering of a wet starfish. Eric looks around to see that the jungle has been reduced to a black jagged ribbon beneath the stars and that the shore is littered with the refuse of suddenly suffocating creatures.

The the roar comes. It is faint at first, just a rush of air, and though he has never heard it before, hi knows what it is just by the way it twists his insides with fear. He hefts te boy, who is confounded, complaining and squirning, being taken away from this rare paradise of the ocean’s bottom. With the extra 80 pounds Eric’s feet sink deep into the ocean soaked sand and running is near impossible. Still, he pressesas hard an fast as he ever has in his life, each step a desperate lengthening of the number of minutes… seconds…?—of what must surely be his death. He can make out elements of the canopy of the jungle and a sudden errant thought levers itself into the panic and terror How can I see without my glasses?

But no matter, he can hear the boy, looking over his shoudler, carried now, screaming now, though moment by moment, the child is drowned out by the onrushing thousand tons of salt water. This is it. The Indian Ocean has buckled and now it will reach out with a thick and wavy hand to slap and crush Eric, and then drag him away; vanish him in the measure of death and evidence.

As the roar comes upon them, Eric stumbles and closes his eyes and gasps for air and sits up in his seat on the train.