The perforated room sailed up past the fifth floor, al the way to the ninth, which led to the roof. She remembered. She tiptoed from the elevator cabin and shouldered her way through the door, into the chil of dawn above the ocean.

In the few moments she’d been rising in the lift, the sky had lightened that much more. The effect was not so smoky, more pearlescent. The buildings at this hour seemed less defined by light. They looked like stone formations left behind after some unimaginable geologic event.

She could make out a tongue of sea beyond the buildings to the west. But no sound from this far away. No apparent motion. Only a lapidary expanse dimming and shading into the sky. No horizon line: just endlessness. Sea and sky inseparable.

Toto began to whimper and to jump around as if he wanted to leap from the ninth floor. “It’s not frightening, it isn’t,” she said, though she didn’t know whether she was trying to convince herself or the dog.

“It’s just the ocean, and another world on the other side. You know al about that. You’re the best-traveled mutt in history, Toto. Stop your fussing! What are you fussing about?” The dog appeared to be going mad, running in circles around her and yipping in some sort of distress.

Dorothy set the cricket cage upon the stone barrier that kept people from faling off the flat roof. “You can come out,” she said to the cricket. “I make my own luck, you make yours. Nobody should live in a cage. Never surrender to that.”

The cricket emerged and rubbed some scratchy parts of itself together. Whether it leaped or whether the wind took it, Dorothy couldn’t say. The cricket guest was there one moment and gone the next.

“Safe landing,” she caled lightly after it. “Oh, al right, Toto, stop that infernal fussing. The wind isn’t going to take you, too. Once in your life was enough.” She picked up the dog and went back into the building. The elevator was where she had left it, quivering at this height. She would ride it down to the fifth floor, and go in and rest next to her uncle and aunt. She had spied something of the ocean, some little hem of it. The globe was round. She could see there was another world beyond this one. That would have to do. Meanwhile, some corn-blind farmer, waled on four sides of his life by Superior Alfalfa, was waiting for her.

She began her descent. She passed the eighth floor and the seventh. About quarter past five on the morning of April 18, 1906, the buildings of San Francisco started to shake.

To Call Winter upon Water

I.

One of her earliest memories. Maybe her first, it was hard to tel, time was unstable then. Swimming through grass that came up as high as her underarms. Or it may have been new grain not yet roughened by summer. Late spring, probably. Her chin stroked by paintbrush tips of green.