SEPTEMBER 31st: A Bad Day in Shine Valley

THE QUAKE

The earthquake shook everything, including the bed of Clementine Lorn. The powerful shock wave came on all at once. It punched its way through the bedrock and then the foundation. The whole house and everything in it suddenly jumped and bounced for a long and terrible minute. Whatever hint of sleep Clementine had was gone completely as she felt herself flung from the thin mattress. Her ears rang with the loud, growling rumble of the shaking ground. She could just barely make out the sounds of glass breaking, boards splitting, and the wild, racing thump of her own panicking heart. Her wide, brown eyes couldn't believe what they saw as she scrambled to hide under her hiccuping bed frame. The floorboards of her small room were undulating wildly. Razor thin fractures suddenly split several of them open with a devastating CRACK.

And then, it was over.

Clementine suddenly gasped. Silence radiated all around her. It was heavy and thick, making the fervent pulse of her heartbeat all the more intense on her eardrums. Imagine a drum, wrapped in thin cotton, in a room made of foam, being beaten with an iron mallet at a breakneck speed. It was a few seconds later when she exhaled loudly. She realized, embarrassingly, the frightening sound she had heard in the immediate wake of the quake had been her own shallow, rasping breaths and nothing more.

It was several minutes before Clementine found the courage to stand up and leave the room. There was already a mess to clean up around her bed-which was now pointed thirty degrees in a different direction. She stepped carefully across the floor, trying to see any debris that might scrape or stab her bare feet in the dark. It might have been impossible if not for the sliver of moonlight stabbing through the dusty blackness. It was coming through from the next room. Her bedroom door was already slightly open. Clementine couldn't see the frame that was now warped and pushing one of the hinges out.

Her small, square bedroom opened onto a humble, little sitting room and kitchen. It wasn't much, but she hadn't needed much. Clementine was a woman of simple taste and few wants. She was a teacher, and a proud one at that. It was her keen textbook knowledge that was helping her calm down. She had never experienced an earthquake before. But she had read and taught about them many times. Clementine had only needed to remember. She wondered, now, how often this place experienced them.

Clementine was in the middle of the small sitting room when the floor began to shake again. Bless me, she thought frightfully. The walls of the house rattled noisily. She reached for the closest one in a moment of panic. The aftershock was over by the time her fingertips felt the warm, wood beams. She stood there, a few uneasy and trembling steps from her bedroom door, trying to calm down again. Heavenly Makers, settle this ground that wishes to shake me into oblivion, she urgently prayed in her head.

As she steadied her breathing once more, her eyes scanned the dark shapes in the room around her. The thin beam of very pale moonlight was reaching through a shattered window on the wall to her left. The sound of a breeze, passing through the branches of a tall cottonwood tree outside, muted the hurried beating of her heart that had gotten loud again. The gentle rustle of the leaves didn't last long ad hadn't masked a noise Clementine had never heard before.

It might have been an animal, but what kind? Maybe it's just the ground settlin' from all the shankin'. Surely that is part of the process. Things have to settle down. It's just part of the nature of things.

Clementine's mind was in overdrive trying to rationalize the things threatening to send her into another panic. She made her way through the dark house to her front door. It, too, was only hanging on by a bent and weakened hinge. It might just be some poor creature trapped under a log. Yes, that's probably it. The quakin' knocked a tree down right onto some deer or rockcat , poor thing.