Kent waited for the telephone to ring with a miracle, for the call that said it was just a mistake, that’s all, an accident, but he’s all right and she’s coming home. And then. That divine shaft of light would illuminate his loss, when that bullet of good fortune struck—struck with all the mystery and extravagance of Oh my God! The reported dead and missing called. Hey, I’m alive. It was a mistake, it really was. Thank you, God, thank you.
Would it save him from the future if he just accepted there was nothing he could do to change the past? They either lived or they died. We were there, just there, was all he could think. And that he should’ve been there in the middle of the Great East Japan Earthquake. He should’ve been amidst the rubble and dust, the toxic wreckage caught between water and fire that brought the cities down. Maybe he would be. Maybe he’d call his mother and father, and tell them, Yeah it’s me, I’m here, yep, right here in the middle of disaster central, buried under a pile of rubble in the dark, air running out, cell phone battery fading, legs crushed, sipping water that drips from the ruins of concrete and steel: The Tohoku Earthquake.
Illustrated by Max Fucking Currie
christopher bundy 