Fragments - Flash Anthology

Twenty-One

From the safety of a designated evacuation location up high in the hills, I saw it finally arrive. The wave.

I would never have thought such an event could happen to my hometown along Puget Sound. And yet, thanks to a terrifying 9.2 earthquake off the edge of Alaska, there was now a looming, lurching mass of water barrelling straight for Seattle and everywhere else along the coast. My parent's home, the home I grew up in. After a long pause where the nearby coast--a place where I used to adventure down to when I wanted to brave a field of nettles--grew eerily long and wide, it came to erase everything. A roaring so loud, it would deafen all else, almost as if to bring peace to the land. Every rotting timber, overgrown rhododendrons, and that one blue and pink scooter someone left at my house and never came back for it after decades--would be picked up and churned like wood in a chipper to be spat out somewhere in various chunks a mile away. My high school, the one large "L" made of concrete posing as bricks and all its subsidiary add-ons built on swampland, would be next. The thin blue-gray carpet that I slid across and burned myself more than once would be flung about as the heavier desks and textbooks would sink into the grinding waves. My entire childhood would be gone, just like that.

And knowing the Puget Sound, all I would have left would be the wretched stench of rotting seaweed across all the wreckage and remains of my memories.