Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood Page A

snug up against her back with his hand on her shoulder. It’s still dark in the room. It’s past six-thirty, but the alarm never went off and the curtains weren’t left open as they usually are to let the morning light start to wake him even before the jangle of the alarm. Paul remembers then; he feels his body remembering the storm even before he can finish the thought in his head. His dry mouth and throat, his bruised arms, his injured hands. He breathes in deeply and exhales, feeling his heart beat faster with dread of the coming day. There is a ribbon of daylight all around the curtains. The air in the room is blue. Paul has never thought of the air as having a color before. He’s assigned colors to the sky or to clouds before, but never the air itself, having only thought of air in terms of light before, whether it is bright or dark and how it changes with the movement of the sun. But the air around him now is blue, a deep, palpable blue that looks as if it would smudge if the daylight weren’t already hurrying it away.
    Paul wonders if he isn’t the only one awake in the house. It’s been a handful of hours since everyone went to sleep, and although there are the occasional sounds from people outside already beginning to pick through the rubble, it’s quiet inside the house. He won’t move yet, he thinks. He won’t even stretch. Let them get all the sleep they can. There were enough disruptions after midnight, people crying out in their sleep at intervals throughout the house, the few children mumbling loudly through nightmares, never waking entirely, just fighting in confusion until a hand on their chest and a low voice in their ear settled them again.
Try to sleep
, he’d said to Homer and Ellis, touching their faces. His boys had lain there, eyes wide and listening, and Paul was sure Lavinia and Ruby had also lain awake. Paul exhales again. He’s not sure what there is for people to get up for, what jobs there are left to go to, and Lord knows when there will be a school again. People will try to salvage what they can from their houses, he supposes, without having any place to put things. Each day’s efforts will surely seem pointless, like being told to move a heap of boulders from here to there only to learn that the next day’s labor is to move them back again.
    Paul’s stomach is tight. He will have to get up, and soon. Getting out of the house again may even be worse than coming home was last night. He can wash and dress quickly as usual, he can even leave through the kitchen door, but he will not be able to avoid seeing in all those eyes the knowledge that, unlike him, they have no place to go to. He realizes he’s still thinking about the lumberyard as it was yesterday, as it was before the storm. Yesterday morning had been Wednesday. Just Wednesday, pleasant and indistinguishable from any other working day. He’d been up early and out the door with the smells of coffee and eggs and bacon still in his nose, the children sleepy at the table, Mae and his mother already distracted by the coming day’s work. The customers coming and going under the bell on the door, the sounds of the saws, his routine with all the weight of the familiar. Greetings and small talk, the occasional car passing outside the windows. Only the talk about the weather was bitter now, the jokes they’d made about forgotten umbrellas, and,
Hurry, get where you’re going before it starts to rain
.
    But he’d left the lumberyard without locking up yesterday, without doing anything more than looking back, astonished, at the front of the building before he took off running for the school. He hadn’t given it another thought the rest of the day, not even when he’d taken his keys and coins out of his pocket and laid them in the dish on the dresser. Up till this moment, he hasn’t given a thought to the people who work for him, to which of them was inside