Ancient Logic

A fun word floated to the top of my head today: Wabi-sabi. It's Japanese, referring to an imperfect, transient melancholy, basically the mood I get into every October around this time. The Wiki on it is pretty good but here's a moment I think defines the word for me: I was walking back to my apartment where I lived for a year in Japan. I turned a corner and saw this flash of red pass in front of my eyes. A red butterfly, seized by the wind. I froze, watching it flutter down to the sidewalk in front of me. Touching ground it became a red momiji leaf.

I wrote this a couple months ago as an experiment in rewriting a Chinese fairy tale by Pu Songling as slipstream flash fiction. The original story is simply titled Earthquake. I hope you like it! The port of San Diego was struck by an earthquake on June 17th, 2027 at seven o'clock in the morning. I was stationed at the barracks then and sipping at tea with my good friend Linda when we heard a sound like thunder rolling from the southeast and going northwest. The lights went out and the video screen toppled from the kitchen table, smashing on the tiles of the kitchen floor. Soon white dust began to seep from the seams of the ceiling and we were thrown from our feet. The walls and rafters shook and shrieked. We looked at each other, our faces gone pale. It took awhile to realize that the sound was coming from outside, in the port. Each of us hurried outside. Two and three story buildings were drunk: swaying to the left and right. The sounds of the disaster, the wails of women an...