Inverted Aquariums
by Matthew Pritt
When the tectonic plates smash against each other and make a new ridge above my house, I’m glad I’m not on the other end, where they come apart. The emergency alert on my phone says it happened in the ocean, and maybe that’s slightly better, except for the fish that get sucked down into the new chasm and blasted with trapped methane, or the other fish riding the approaching tsunami, banished inland to briefly live in houses, looking at their cousins stuck unawares in tiny, sanitized tanks.
I wonder if either would feel envious of the other.
My house survives the earthquake but the road doesn’t, so even if I wanted to evacuate before the tsunami, I couldn’t. I’m going to die today. Outside on the crumbled road, my neighbor, Ted, is sprinting away, stumbling on uneven ground every other step. He’s a daily runner, but come on.
I turn on my favorite playlist. I step around ceramic shards in the kitchen and make coffee in a dirty mug that didn’t get the chance to fall from the cupboard because it was in the sink. For the first time, I’m glad I settled for a Keurig. The inside of the machine is probably full of mold and the coffee is terrible, but it’s ready before the ocean hits. Sometimes a small good outweighs all the other shit.
I’m thankful I don’t have kids. I wish I had a dog, the kind that really could outrun the apocalypse, just so I could watch something survive one more time.
I don’t call my brother.
I should be doing what I love in these last few minutes, but I’m not sure if I love anything anymore. Do I even like coffee? Maybe good coffee, but not this kind. It’s too bitter. Do I like bitterness? Do I like being bitter?
It would explain a lot.
I search BlueSky for GoFundMe drives for random people’s medical bills and empty my bank account. It’s enough to meet goals for a cancer treatment and a gender affirmation surgery. It feels more consequential than anything I’ve done with the rest of my life.
When the tsunami arrives, the new ridge above me blocks it from smashing into the house. Instead, it folds over like a pastry and the ocean backs up until I’m at the bottom of a trench. My house is leaking. I sip my coffee as saltwater swirls around my ankles.
A body slams against my front window, my neighbor Ted, and I do feel envious, but I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because he died running, with a goal. Or that he had the energy to run at all.
I wade to the front door. Before I let the water in to shatter me with my mugs, I do call my brother. Not so he can hear me inside my inverted aquarium, or so that he can know what’s happening to me, but because if he answers, that means everything is fine where he is. His family is healthy, his cat is doing well, his windows aren’t spiderwebbing under an impossible weight, and maybe he’s even drinking good coffee.
It rings twice before he answers.
“Hello?”
It’s more than enough for me.
I hang up before I open the door.
Matthew Pritt (he/him) is an Appalachian writer of literary and speculative fiction. His work has appeared in Vast Chasm Magazine, The Sunlight Press, and Bullshit Lit, among others. Find Matthew on BlueSky.
