The Mimosa Effect 2

She couldn’t remember how long she had been digging, how long ago she had heard the voices.  It was hard to make out what they were saying over the incessant pounding, her own pulse magnified and echoed back, as if she were holding a conch shell up to her ear.  She would have cried out to them, but there was dirt in her mouth, and something heavy on her chest that made it hard to breathe.   Something they were doing made everything shift, and the chaos of rubble above her began to collapse.  For one heart-stopping moment she was sure that she was dead, but then the weight on her chest went away, and she could move again.  Then hours – days maybe – of pushing away dirt and rocks with her numb hands, until she felt blood running down her arms.  The last thing she pushed away was a table, broken clean in half.  Things fell down beside her as she shoved her way into the light – books, sodden and stinking, a stapler that bounced off her bare foot – and then the brightness hit her, blinding, painful, more wondrous and enervating than anything she had ever felt before.  At first she concentrated on breathing, on shaking the sparks out of her eyes.  When she could see again, she wondered if she had somehow climbed through the centre of the earth into a different country – a different planet – altogether.  Someone had taken the world and turned it into a swamp, dirt-brown water choked with dead trees.  A giant had upended box after box of matchsticks and kindling, and then sent a landslide down on top of it.  The remains of houses, she realized, of roads and bridges.  There were no people that she could see, only gulls wheeling high above, silhouetted against the fabulous, impossibly blue sky.

After a while Jenny started to walk.  She tried not to think about being knee-deep in sewage, about what had happened to the others.  A metal sign floated past her, advertising family day at the Audubon Zoo.  She was wondering how many of the animals could swim, when she saw it – a flash of orange and black, powerful muscles rippling as it leapt, landed, leapt again.  One of the rubble piles was unstable, and the tiger flailed for a moment, until it regained its balance.  Jenny held herself perfectly still, although part of her wanted to run after it.  It was the only living thing she had seen on the ground.  She watched its calculated progress – bounding from dry spot to dry spot, testing its footing, giant paws tentative – until the startling sound of an engine made her look behind her.  So great was her joy at the sight of the metal fishing boat rumbling towards her that for a moment she forgot about the tiger.  Just before they pulled her up into the boat, she looked back over her shoulder, but the magnificent creature was gone.

Despite everything, out of all the things she remembered about that day, that moment felt the most real – even though she was never really sure, afterwards, if she had not simply imagined it.

For Saturday Scribes: Theme: Journey; Form: Flash Fiction; Words: conch, stapler, fabulous, enervate; Headline: Tiger Roams in Hurricane’s Aftermath