He leaned forward to look at the picture once again. “Maybe later, Rusty.” Bill let his eyes slide to the small table. A huge roach was edging across its smooth top. He rolled up the paper, and whacked it. “Ha.”

A vibration beneath his feet tickled his soles. He forgot the roach and frowned in the direction of the vacuum-cleaner noise. “What the hell setting has that woman got it on?”

Another vibration and he noticed the surface of his tea shimmy. He reached for the cup just as there came a thump from below. The vacuum went off, followed by silence for several seconds.

“Bill?” Margaret called from the other room, apprehension in the word.

“Wasn’t me, honey.” Bill sat still, silent, waiting. There was another thump, then another, the latest from overhead. “What the hell?”

A deeper thump, again from below, sounding like someone was shifting heavy furniture in their basement. An antique plate on the mantelpiece tilted forward and fell to the rug.

“Margie?” Bill slowly rose to his feet as his wife entered the room, her forehead creased, her hands wringing a cleaning cloth.

“Bill, are you…?”

Bill shook his head, turning it slowly, concentrating on listening, his arms out from his sides slightly, as though to help with his balance.

Several more thumps came from above, and Margaret squeaked and hunched her shoulders. Bill looked to the window. Outside, there seemed nothing unusual – the garden and, beyond that, the Wilsons’ house, with the lemon tree just covered in green bulbs not yet ripe enough to pick overhanging the fence in between.

More thumps, and, as Bill watched, something black struck the lawn, and then another. Bill squinted – birds.

“Hey, birds are –”

Bill never finished that thought: another thump cracked the plaster in the walls, and the house actually seemed to drop a few inches.

“Whoa.” Bill noticed Margaret’s face was white, and her wringing hands continued to move up to her breasts, as though she was praying. She was shaking her head; her eyes were watering.

He smiled at her. “Stay there. We’ll be fine.”

There came a blast of thick heat, and then the house simply…fell. Bill felt himself become weightless, as if gravity had been suspended. Outside the windows went black at the same time as the power shut down. The only light was thrown down from above, and outside he could still see movement, but rapid, as though walls were shooting upwards past the windows.

There was a crash. Margaret screamed, and Bill was smashed to the floor. His wife of thirty-five years began to sob, and that hurt him more than anything else. He got to his knees, staying there for several seconds as he checked his numerous aches and bruises. He was relieved to find that nothing was broken – at sixty-five, bones were like kindling.

“Oh god.” He gagged, and put a hand over his mouth and nose, as a God-awful stench filled the house. His brow ran with perspiration from the heat.