In The New York Times they gave out on the aeroplane I found the story of Tom Sanders. I was going to send you the whole cutting but I may have accidentally made a compost bag out of it. I record the story here as I remember it.

THE EARTH SWALLOWED UP A SLEEPING MAN

28.2.2013, Florida (if I remember rightly). Tom Sanders went to bed at night, as usual. His wife was working the night shift and the children were asleep in their rooms, upstairs from their parents’. At 2.14 a.m., the ground under Tom Sanders’s house unexpectedly gave way. A ten-metre chasm opened up, drawing in the bedroom floor, along with the room’s sleeping occupant, Tom Sanders.

The children ran downstairs and saw that half of the bottom floor of the house was missing. The neighbours alerted the authorities, who managed to rescue the children from the stairs. The search for Tom Sanders, who had been swallowed up by the ground, began immediately. The family hoped he was caught in a kind of air pocket.

Twenty-four hours later, the search had to be discontinued because the whole house was in danger of collapsing. The man was never found. The depth of the subsidence was estimated at around ten metres but could not be assessed with any certainty.

So if the sky and the sea are not reliable, then neither, always, is the ground! Lumps of ice fall, lightning strikes, waves surge, and sometimes the ground quite simply tears itself open.

I hope you are well and looking after yourself.

Regards,
Annu Heiskanen

My friend Mr MacKay,

I wish you a merry Christmas. I trust you have not changed address?

I forgot to tell you in my previous letter about a woman who was sitting next to me on the plane, a retiree. Mrs Judith said that sometimes, what’s most miraculous is when nothing happens. She told me about how, in 1999, she was almost the victim of a bomb attack.

She was standing at a supermarket checkout when there was a bang by the shop entrance. The security guard standing in the doorway was hit by a cluster of nails and lost both of his eyes. Many others were injured, too. But Mrs Judith was bagging her shopping, ten seconds away from the door.

I said it was lucky that nothing happened to her.

So everyone said, she replied. Nothing happened. That’s true. But for years she kept asking herself:

Why was I in that particular place?

Why wasn’t I in the other place?

If the bus hadn’t been late, I wouldn’t have been in that shop then.

If I had picked another checkout to queue at, I would have been quicker.

Why was the bus late?

Why am I where I am at any given moment?

Why did nothing happen? Why did something nearly happen?