On a Fault Line

by Jacqui Reiko Teruya

We sit on the cement of our grandfather’s boxed garden and wait for the roll of an aftershock. The January air of California is the coldest we have known. Charcoal smolders white and turns to ash in the belly of the hibachi. Chili oil pools—thin and red—in the corners of an iron skillet. Jiichan’s face is showered in sunspots; his eyes squint at a brown egg in his hand. We boil water in a tin kettle over the grates of the grill and Auntie makes rice the old-fashioned way. City camping, our grandmother calls it. The earthquake hit in the night. It shook dishes from cupboards. Brought bricks loose from the fireplace. There is no electricity; the phones are still down. We do not think of our house or our parents or the fights that also break dishes. Sirens moan in the distance.

Near the garden wall we crush cans because our grandfather asks us to. I place three cans in a row: two beer cans and a cola. My brother lifts a metal pipe—the width of a baseball, the length of a bat—and brings it down on each can. They crumple, one-by-one, into aluminum puddles, sticky to the touch. We hold discs up and try to spot the sun through creases in the metal. They are the moons of Jupiter, the suns of a new galaxy. My brother smashes his lips and makes the sound of spaceships. I hold two orbs, one to each corner of my head, and say I am mouse. The kind that steals cubed cheese and never gets caught in the snap of a mousetrap.

My brother asks for more cans. I place them in a line. The crunch is satisfying. It makes him giddy; it makes him show more teeth. His hair, black like mine, falls in his eyes each time he brings the pipe to meet the ground. The aluminum scrapes cement as I peel them up and toss them into our bin. Our bin fills. It feels like hundreds. They spin like tops, clink like treasure. The ground shakes, a soft rumble, a gentle sway. We barely notice. We are not afraid. We are a factory. We are making coins, filling a vault. It is the time when we feel most like one and half children rather than two. Twins, the kind joined at the crook of their necks or along the line of their hips. We shake the barrel for our grandmother. We beat its sides. Baba, we say, look at them shimmer. She runs her fingers through our hair and tells us we did good. She tells us to wash up, to come and eat.

We eat from blue camping bowls. Jiichan wraps rubber bands around our hashi and we spear sausage and nibble at the edges. We sit, shoulders touching, rice stuck to shirt collars and the sides of our faces. We lean together, our arms pushing hard into the other. Tell them, you tell them, our weight seems to say. We wish for one more day. We wish for more chili-red eggs and bonito flakes. We wish our house had a garden, tall and green like Jiichan’s. We do not know how to tell them that we wish to stay, that we would be good kids if they kept us. The kind of kids that would listen, that would wash before dinner. The kind of kids that would crush cans as long as they would like. We grow still, we grow quiet. We listen to the sirens get close and loud.

Jacqui Reiko Teruya is an MFA candidate at Boise State University where she teaches and is the associate editor for The Idaho Review. A lover of bookstores, a hater of Amazon, she worked as an indie bookseller before pursuing a degree in fiction. Winner of the 2018 Summer Flash Fiction Contest and second place finalist in the 2019 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize, her work has appeared in The Masters Review and CRAFT.