All of Us and Everything by Bridget Asher Read Free Book Online

looked like a dimly glowing box of hand-painted wooden horses. Finally the lights flickered and dimmed. It was swallowed by darkness.
    People were being washed out to sea, drowning in basements, killed by fallen trees.
    And the fires of Breezy Point were about to spark and catch and burn.
    Houses were being battered and splintered. A roller coaster was being shoved out into the ocean itself, its rickety body thrusted by waves, which were heaving sand onto the shore—eventually into people’s living rooms, including their own.
    Homeless, lost, searching, stricken…and temperatures primed to drop…
    Augusta thought of someone she’d loved and lost and wondered if he would get word of her death. She assumed she would get word if he’d died—how exactly, she wasn’t sure. She was very scared but she didn’t feel it the way she should. “I’m not as scared as I ought to be.”
    “We can’t leave now.” This was a practical consideration. It would be more dangerous to wade out than to stay put, on higher ground.
    “Do you mind if I hum something?” Music for Hurricanes, she thought.
    “I don’t mind, Ms. Rockwell. Not at all.”
    “You can call me Augusta.”
    “After all these years,” Jessamine said, “I don’t think I can.”
    “Fair enough.”
    But then a strange thing happened. Augusta lifted her hand to conduct the storm, and the hand was shaking. Her body was betraying her will; she was more afraid than she realized. “Will you look at this?” she said, holding the hand in the air.
    Jessamine saw the trembling and immediately she took Augusta’s hand and held it tight.
    Augusta didn’t hum any music. She didn’t try to conduct this hurricane. The two women sat together, holding hands as the storm lashed and raged.
    Change, Augusta thought. Storms churn things up and they set things in disarray and one is forced to right them. What change would come? Would she be here to see it?
    Maybe she was no longer interested in keeping things as they were.
    Change, she thought to herself. So be it.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2012
    Ru Rockwell was the only one in the family who knew nothing about the storm. She was living in a longhouse in a M’nong village in the Highlands of Vietnam. She shared the longhouse—just one room—with seventeen people, one family spanning three generations. The fourth generation was in utero.
    When the storm reached its crescendo on the East Coast of the United States on Monday night, it was already Tuesday morning in the village. The children had been capturing crickets, and after the appropriate daylong wait they were cooking them over a fire in the center of the room, which didn’t have a chimney. The lack of chimney was supposed to help the house-on-stilts keep its structure—she wasn’t sure how—while also deterring unwanted insects. It made it hard to see and breathe.
    When the matriarch offered some smoked crickets to Ru, she ate them, of course. She was trying to assimilate, which was why she was wearing a long striped skirt down to her ankles, even though the children were in Hello Kitty and Elmo shirts.
    She noted that the crickets weren’t as seasoned as the stir-fried ones she’d picked off the appetizer section of the menu at Typhoon in Santa Monica, not as nutty, but not bad.
    I miss doughy foods,
she said softly into her handheld battery-operated recording device.
Some people equate doughy fullness with a kind of maternal love. Augusta outsourced that maternal task.
    She didn’t record her thoughts in order to remember them. She had an eidetic memory. She wrote them down in case she died here.
    The thought crossed her mind many times a day. The idea that she was here to experience something visceral now seemed so manufactured that she was sure that an ironic death would be more fitting, that her death seemed inevitable—if only from a writer’s perspective.
    She wasn’t really a novelist or even a screenwriter so much as a collector of one-liners that went