When It Hit

When it hit — that’s what it felt like; something crashing against the wall of our bedroom. When it hit, we grabbed each other like monkeys. The house jiggled like Jello. “It’s just an earthquake,” I manage to say.

“I hear water,” my wife says. I jump out of bed toward the Living Room, remembering a burst water pipe one winter.

“Be careful of glass!” She’s my other brain; the sensible one. I put on my slippers.

I creep through the hallway, looking for an intruder. I turn on the overhead light. It flashes, then pops into darkness. I try another. It lights.

The sound gets louder. It’s the iRobot vacuum. Knocked away from its docking station, it whirls and bumps into things, while the Dining Room chandelier swings through an arc of sixty degrees — “like if you cut a pie into six pieces,” I later tell my wife. (She rolled her eyes.) I pick up the iRobot as though it were a little animal, gently returning it to its dock.

In the Family Room, there’s broken glass everywhere. I notice Mochi, our black and white Sheltie, standing next to me.

“I thought you were supposed to warn us of stuff like this!”

She looks at me perplexed, then trots back to the Bedroom, snuggles into her crate, and sleeps until breakfast.