The Big Click: May 2012 (Issue 2) by The Big Click

Author:The Big Click [Big Click, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Big Click
Published: 2012-04-26T19:58:01+00:00

© 2012 Dan Fante.

About Dan Fante

Dan Fante is the author of novels, plays, short stories and two volumes of poetry. His newest novel, Point Doom, will be released through Harper Perennial in January, 2013.

The Man Who Loved Birds

by Mar Preston

Harold Shorsey awoke that morning certain that a freight train had collided with the front of the house. The bucking and shuddering of the daybed in his study bounced him up in the air and then onto the floor. From an epicenter fifteen miles away, a previously unknown fault fishtailed upward, emerging to grind into the surface rock that formed the Santa Monica Mountains.

All around Harold was the creaking judder of load-bearing walls straining at the foundations. Glass crackled and fell in sheets. Heavy furniture toppled forward onto the carpet. CD recordings flew like Frisbees across the room. There were several blinding flashes that Harold realized later had been transformers blowing.

He heard his wife Mei-Chun shouting from the next bedroom and tried to rise to his feet just as a bookcase, not bolted to the wall, splintered and flung hundreds of scientific textbooks into his frantic path as he clawed his way out of the room.

It was black dark. His heart was beating so fast, a coronary seemed imminent. He staggered into the living room, stumbling and falling over the stereo equipment tossed the length of the connector cords from the shelves. Mei-Chun grabbed at his arm and fell with him, her small body landing hard, cross-wise against him. She was screaming into his ear, but he could scarcely hear her amid the avalanche of kitchen cupboard contents falling and smashing on the floor.

It stopped finally as anything so terrible must. In the eerie silence that followed, he heard dogs barking and car alarms going off up and down the city street. Mei-Chun struggled to sit up.

Harold could see nothing but impenetrable, palpable thick darkness. He kept his hand on Mei-Chun’s shoulder.

“That was a big one,” he said, his voice breaking.

Mei-Chun pulled herself away from him. He heard the crunch of music cassette cases splintering under her feet as she walked from the room.

“Put some shoes on,” he ordered her, trying at this late date to take charge.

He heard her punching numbers on the phone.

“They need the phone for emergencies. You shouldn’t use it.”

“I want to call the boys and tell them we’re all right. The phone’s dead.” She flung the phone away from her and plunged into the dark. She’d naturally think of the boys first, off at Yale now, a continent between themselves and their father.

His little flock of sparrows were silent, unmoving from their perch in the service porch. From somewhere in the living room he heard the flutter of the raven’s wings, a broken-off ark-ark. Harold tentatively stood up, becoming aware of fine plaster sifting down from the ceiling. The house jerked leftward sharply with the first aftershock and Harold crouched down again, waiting for the roof to fall in upon him. He felt his way to the closet and found a flashlight, shining it around the living room.

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