Just as I start to turn away, a sound makes me look up. It’s all wrong, a thunder sound coming from a calm white sky. It’s not thunder; it’s continuous and it builds until it’s so much louder than the other landslips. The growls have shrieks on top, like demons fucking, like worlds grinding against each other.

A second later I know. No, I’m not ready. Stop it now, you horrible fuck! Stop it right fucking now! I bolt to get away, try to get the front door open to escape farther from the slipping cliff at the rear of the house and what’s left of the backyard. It hasn’t been used for so long that it’s stuck. I pull the knob as hard as I can, bracing one foot against the wall and gritting my teeth and trying until my right hand starts to bleed again and I give up and race through the living room and kitchen and out around the back.

I cling to the side of the house, eyes pointed stubbornly upward, and trudge up the hill with the ocean spitting behind my back and the ground shifting, hurling chunks off and out and away. As I trip my way up the broken stairs my hands can’t do anything, I can’t stop the frames and rewind and edit. My voice is nothing against the roar of hundreds of tons of rock slamming against the rocks below, earth splitting apart from itself, giving in to the waves grabbing at its side, and the cracking and ripping apart of beams and pipes, the whine of the greedy wet mouth of that big blue monster reaching up to swallow my grandmother’s house. The dust billows up to scratch my eyes out while I run for a safe distance to watch and listen and wait for the slip to come and pull me in, too.

Heat starts to pull apart the white film stretching across the sky, blue eyes blinking awake. The sea gets excited at the attention. It’s behind me but I can hear what it’s up to: one hand punching the cliff, others in the swarm clapping at the brutality, froth fingering the little caves and rock pools, breakers draping themselves onto rocks and clinging and pulling like a depressive boyfriend. It pokes into my peripheral vision. I turn my face away but it carries on. It wants me terrified and sputtering, near frozen, eyes and mouth open, laid out for the sea things to check me for freshness before they eat me.

* * *