Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood Read Free Book Online Page A

the odd black tree trunk sticking out of the ruins. He hasn’t yet told any of this to his mother, although he knows it’s possible she’s already guessed.
    What can have been in those children’s minds in the last seconds before the school collapsed, he wonders. Had any of them, any one of them, understood what was about to happen? There hadn’t been any such moment for Paul. He’d known somehow as he sank to the sidewalk with his arms around the telegraph pole and laid there on his belly to wait out the tearing wind that he’d done the right thing. And knowing now that he hadn’t just been lucky, that if he’d stayed inside the store he would have been safe there too was terrible to bear. He was fine. He would have been fine no matter what.
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    The night had turned heartbreakingly clear, and when there was nothing more he could do at the school, he’d walked home in the moonlight. The first relief trains had pulled in by then, as close as they could come to the shattered depot. Doctors and nurses had come in on those trains, and the worst of the injured had gone out on them when they’d pulled out again. Medical supplies were beginning to flow into town, and he’d heard reports that surgeries were in full swing in the undamaged parts of the hospital and the high school. He’d been offered a blanket, which he’d declined, and hot coffee and a doughnut, which he’d accepted. His hands had been bandaged, and while he’d sat there on the ground, he’d slowly taken in the blood-red crosses on the nurses’ still-spotless white uniforms, and had found himself close to weeping at the wave of relief, the miraculous relief that had come when he’d surrendered to their care.
    As he had walked home, he’d laughed a little at the moon’s consideration, illuminating the ruins around him as it had, making the giant splinters shine where they lay so that he could safely pick his way home without streetlight. He’d felt nothing in the air. If he closed his eyes to the wrecked houses around him, he’d wondered, would he feel a weight in the air, a heaviness or any whisper at all of what had happened that day? He had looked up instead, past the few bare trees at the blue-black sky and the moon, but there had been nothing, only the lingering smell of burning, and looking far up above himself, he could let that remind him of other pleasanter things.
    His street had been strange and still; he’d met no one at all while walking its length. It might have seemed that everyone but him had been blown right out of Marah except for the small flicker of candlelight in the windows of intact houses. There would be candles lit at home, too, he’d thought, and when he realized that he was almost there, he’d slowed. It had surprised him how quick his walk had been, but then his landmarks were mostly gone, and it had been like walking the street for the first time. He’d stopped half a block from home to look from a distance at the Duttweiler house on the far corner. He had seen it earlier in the daylight, but he’d been preoccupied then and hadn’t given any real thought to it in comparison with his own house. It had, after all, been only one of a long string of bizarre, sad things he’d seen in the first hours after the storm. Standing there in the moonlight it had seemed terrifying and comic in equal measure; a freak of a giant’s dollhouse. On the corner opposite his own house, the storm had slung the Duttweiler house around as if it weren’t even fixed to its underpinnings and ripped off one side entirely, only to cross the street and do nothing more than dirty his house and the next few after his.
    He’d finally seen his own car pointing the wrong way in the driveway then. It had surely been like that when he’d run home the first time, but desperate as he was to see his family safe, he hadn’t seen it. Spun