I’m better off on a surfboard lying on my stomach That trashcan was a mess.Įarthquake feels really weird, messing with my senses, my brain. Thatīus trip our class took to Griffith Park? Puke city. Everyone knows she got carsick last year in the Fourth grade. Whitehead is the only one totally freaking out. Reaches up with a long condor arm and yanks me under the desk. Would probably giggle too if I wasn’t so worried about Dad. To them it seems fun-like a rollercoaster, like ocean waves moving under our chairs. I wonder if I’mĬalls from somewhere by my feet. Hands are frozen to the desk where Denise and I usually sit. Planets zoom everywhere, meteoric, shooting pinballs in the cosmos. History’s come alive! Other mobiles of the solar system make the Anthony and Harriet Tubman allĭance crazily. Classroom mobiles of famousĪmericans twirl and swing. Lucas slides her huge blue-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose. Little falcon that feasts on small flying things. Scoots to safety beneath her desk like the yellow-rumped warblers that dartīetween trees in the schoolyard so they don’t get eaten by the local merlin, a Words beg for some kind of help I can’t give right now.Ĭry out in her direction. In my stomach, like my ribs are collapsing, like my bones are rattling free. Shaking screams at me, jars my legs, my face, everything. It’s exactly 9:17 a.m.-one of those times you can remember forever. It screams and grinds as ifĮverything in the classroom starts swaying and shaking. I don’t realize what I’m hearing at first. The time the last student pipes down there comes a howl that slowly builds fromįar away. This is the kind that glues you in place, that freezes you likeĪncient bugs and dinosaur feathers in amber. The Gulf of Mexico after a rickety raft ride. Lucas stops mid sentence in her discussion of Estebanico splashing ashore in “You’ve got pencil shavings everywhere,” Denise whispers. Only I had the guts to say something right now. Lucas blabbing about Cabeza de Vaca on the Island of Doom. Water moving or the goldfish freaking out. I always thought that stupid eel was looking at me. Help that the fake eel skeleton the goldfish have been darting around hasįallen over in the tank. One sees the classroom fish tank quivering, the water sloshing up toward theĮdges like when I dive in the bathtub with my Chewbacca action figures. At least twelve kids have a better view than me but no Ragged like a storm tossed it in every direction, and a face that I thinkĪlways seems slightly confused, like I want to know the answers but someone’s I just feel that way sometimes, like everything isĭisappearing around me. In the third row, second seat, nearly invisible. Like I said, Suzie can’t predict a thing. She’s writing a love note to Cooper Hawk. Tommy Warren, Jon Pox, and Simon Borrows are Still, no one is noticing but me.Įspinoza is completely hopeless. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpse the water in the classroom fish tank moving Like I should light them on fire and toss my math book on top, I can’t think of I slowly scoop them into a pile and though sometimes I feel I’ve just sharpened my pencil down to nothing, scattering pencil Even the neighborhood muttsīehind our homeroom have gone silent as cottontails.Ĭan’t breathe. I don’t see any students in the hallway right now anyway. Wonder if Clayton can hear the crashing in my chest from several desks away.

Thuds are rocking my ears from my heart turning into pistons. I can’t think about all those flames and everything right now because giant Dad says I’m more aware of my surroundings since theįire. I can tell because a scary lump has risen in my Not because I’m aīig is on the way though. On Twitter of Survival: Realize You Have a ProblemĬry.

Sometimes a ghostwriter of contemporary fiction and YA, heĬurrently lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his wife Jane. Technologies, in specific, electronic fiction as a new literary current. Literature by scholars who seek to discover the fusion of art with digital Novel form, Small Places, which has been studied as part of digimodernism in He illustrated map drawings for the New York Timesīest-selling novel West of Here, and is the author of the first twitterature in Speculative Fiction for Dreamers (Ohio State University Press), SouthwesternĪmerican Literature (Texas State University), Carve Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Has appeared or is forthcoming in the YA-themed edition of The Latinx Archive: Nicholas Belardes is a dual-ethnic Chicano writer.

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