remember the easter quake, when he was young

She couldn’t remember where she had placed the sugar.

It wasn’t raining, but it looked like it might be in the city.

Things were not in order, and he had trouble sleeping when things were not in order. Their lives had been turned around by the quake; not broken apart but rotated backwards. They were safe, and had everything that they had before, but finding it became difficult.

Their son, the little boy, was sensitive to seismic activity. He liked it; when he was a baby, on their trips to the Midwest, he would never stop crying, fussing over the stillness of the dirt under their feet. But in California, he was always happy. He tugged at their legs before every tremor. It took them some time to make the connection. The big one, on Easter Sunday last year, he was rolling on the living room carpet like a cat. She opened the door, and he bolted out into the yard, and buried his ears in the earth. She was just about to pull him up like a carrot when the window panes began to shake. He stopped moving. She called to him, before she realized that he was in the safest place possible. She thought he was afraid, but when she got closer, and lay down next to him, she realized that he was laughing. They both let the shaking stop, and rolled onto their backs. The quake had left them behind. The neighbors streamed from their apartments like worker ants.
She tried to remember what she had been doing. Looking for the sugar. Brown sugar. She had been baking a carrot cake.

“I don’t think that’s possible,” he said, after she told him what had happened.
“You go away too much.”
“You don’t go away enough.”
How could she? The little boy who loved shaking needed her.
“He’s different.”
“Maybe he’s autistic.”
“Maybe. I don’t care, I don’t really care, but I think it’s amazing that he can do something impossible.”
“He can’t predict them. Nobody can predict them.”
“No, but he can feel them. I think he can hear them, too.”
Her husband, who traveled for work, but didn’t make much money, sighed. “How bad was it?”
“Not bad. Like the top of a roller coaster, but it stopped before we really started down.”
“You were ok?”
“He was rolling around on the grass. Like he knew. Like he knew he would be safe there. Nothing broken."
-she thought about the look on his face, being rumbled in the afternoon sun-
"But the sugar moved."