AMY R. MARTIN
NATURAL AND UNNATURAL DISASTERS
Twister
The tornado hip-checks the corner of the Kmart on Route 40. I know tornadoes move in a straight line, but this one sashays like a runway model into the store, then meanders in regular sinuous curves as it eats glass and hurls shelving units, cutting its swath.
I’ve had this dream ever since a tornado touched down and shattered my bedroom window when I was a child.
I spend most of the dream trying to predict the storm’s path. I reason: if the floor of the Kmart is a floodplain, then I must stand either on the outer, concave bank or on the inner, convex one—the cut bank or the point bar—to avoid it.
The spinning vortex makes a noise like a car being crushed in a compactor at a salvage yard, but there’s not a breath of wind. I pick my spot and wait.
Sometimes, my husband wakes me. Sometimes, he’s not there.
Quake
A magnitude 5.8 earthquake strikes 90 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., four miles beneath a tiny gold mining town called Mineral. How apropos, I think. Mineral. The earthquake cracks the Washington Monument on the National Mall and collapses the roof of Mineral’s town hall. I think of the mantle thinning below Mineral. I think of the Earth grinding its teeth to relieve the pressure.
After the quake, my husband, who hates me for making him responsible, who soon will fuck a girl who thinks feckless is a positive character trait, hands me our sick newborn. I feel her warm, sticky body settle against my clavicle and press her damp forehead, still the color of hedge mustard, into the crevice of my neck.
Sinkhole
My daughter slouches against me on a park bench, her hands shoved deep into the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt. Despite the sunshine, there are not many people out: an older couple pushing walkers, a boy playing with his dog, a couple of children racing up and down the stairs of a gazebo at the other end of the duck pond.
“What do you want to tell me?” she asks.
A marriage is built on a limestone surface layer, I think. I didn’t see the warning signs: a small depression, a radial of cracks in the ground, slumping trees and fenceposts, an accumulation of rainfall. When the cover collapsed, I subsided into a bedrock-edged chasm, a void. I didn’t fight or flee. I froze in a blue hole.
“Freezing is a trauma response, too,” my therapist told me.
But how do you tell your daughter that you stayed when you could have gone? What will she think of you then?
Wildfire
I am good and mad. I burn it all down. I run with wolves. I swoop and slash, breathe fire, foam at the mouth, spit feathers. I am Medusa, a harpy, a fury, a sphinx. I am monstrous and wild. All behind a tight-lipped smile.
I escape to Zambia to be a primal thing. I weave through what was once a dense mopane woodland, where elephants over-browsed the butterfly-shaped leaves. The trees are now uprooted, upended. Left behind: a veld of blackened stubble.
He loved her, I think, with that kind of love, the kind of love that reduces your insides to ash and razes your life to the ground.
I follow a yellow-billed kite to a cairn of quills and an intestine, glistening like obsidian in the morning sun. I gape at a steep-sloped termite mound that looks like a massive sand drip castle; inside lies a queen the size of an index finger, a translucent egg sac with a head. She is an ovary and nothing more.
From beside an acacia tree, I watch as a pride of lions, their chins matted and dripping with blood and their eyes glazed, shred a wildebeest. Disturbed, a lion approaches me from across the savanna; he tosses his head, reveals his teeth. His low-pitched, full-throated snarl enters my body through the soles of my feet and ignites every one of my nerve endings. My grief, in this moment, extinguished. There is nothing now but lion.
Flood
Back home I think of his hands on her breasts. I think of his head between her thighs. I imagine her arching her back, closing her eyes, throwing her head back onto the pillow. I think of their limbs entwined, I think of him telling her stories, I think of her laughing. I think of them talking about me.
When I climb on top of him, I wonder if she moved her body like this, touched herself like this, swept her hair up and away like this.
I remember how one night not long ago I reached for him, and he picked up my arm in contempt and flung it away.
I resort to locking the door when I shower, to dressing and undressing behind closed doors. I learn to hate the sight of my skin. I steep in sorrow. I am a river without banks. But at least I am rising; it is a kind of mutiny. Better to be a river, perhaps, than a rock.
Eruption
One day I find a small Moleskine notebook—a black widow spider lurking—in a corner at the bottom of his nightstand drawer. I hook a finger under the elastic closure and slide it off—delicately, deliberately, the way a man might slide a bra strap off a woman’s shoulder.
Inside are maps of Dublin’s commuter rail and tram networks, travel tips, and a handwritten note she has written to him: “This is going to be wonderful.”
I hadn’t known they’d gone to Dublin. Had they visited Michael Collins’ grave at Glesnevin? Eaten pork belly at Fade Street Social? Sipped Americano at one of Coffeeangel’s five Dublin cafés? I wonder if there are other little black books lying dormant, ones I might find and ones I never would.
I Google the reimagined cocktails at Peruke & Periwig. I imagine her ordering the bourbon milkshake called Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore and him opting for an espresso martini called Kismet. There is one made for me, one with Tanqueray London Dry Gin, Elderflower, Pedro Ximénez, Peruke’s Grape Shrub, Sauvignon Blanc, Cucumber, and Lemon. They call it the Grapes of Wrath.
Drought
I close my eyes and imagine a life without rejection. In this daydream I sit on a ramshackle low-country pier, wearing flip-flops and a spaghetti-strap sundress, draining a Moscow Mule from a cold copper mug, and drawing lazy circles in the air with my pedicured toes.
I’m surrounded by salt marsh—by tidal water, cord grass, pluff mud, and oyster beds.
But when I open my eyes and look below my feet, the ground is parched, desiccated, a geometric polygonal plain that resembles the bark of a tessellated tree. All is brittle, sun-baked, and bone-dry.
There is nothing to do but sit and wait for rain.
Amy R. Martin is a producer/screenwriter and essayist based in Vienna, Virginia. Her words have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Cleaver, Atlas + Alice, Variant Literature, JMWW, and elsewhere. She is Stage & Screen Editor at the Southern Review of Books and has an MFA from the Queens University of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina.