The whole bed beneath me jerked violently back and forth, five feet maybe ten each time, the mattress bouncing and shaking more and more with each thrust, the dimly-lit walls wiggling as if they were made of rubber, and after I had flung myself onto my feet and into a pair of pants and ran desperately to the front door, I was surprised to find when I stepped into the brightness of a freshly-ignited dawn that life seemed to be continuing on as usual, the most dedicated (and presumably high-paid) of the infamous Japanese businessmen already whizzing by in their cars at what must have been four thirty or five in the morning.
Despite the evident lack of damage, and although the five floors of apartments above hadn’t fallen in on me and my own ground-floor living quarters like I had so genuinely expected, I decided right then and there that I did not like earthquakes, and that maybe it was time to get the hell out of Japan.
Tag: natural disasters
Death of a Planet
“In a never-ending quest to manipulate their planet to better suit their every selfish desire, the Earth-dwellers attempted to cease the eruption of all volcanoes by pumping all of the core’s magma out into space,” Professor Ylyvys explained to his eighth-grade class about the ex-planet that had become infamous even to them, nine galaxies away. “They never fully understood the aliveness of their planet until they drained its life-blood, which killed not only Earth but also everything and everyone on it.”