By Shome Dasgupta
The river was cracking and shifting—I assumed the plates below must have been churning to cause such an event, and between the lightning strikes I could see fish dying to become humans—the icy water was suffocating them, turning their gills into frozen window panes, and I felt the ground trembling as the plates were adjusting so I ran to the pitcher's mound of the nearby baseball park, thinking that it would be the best place to be for an earthquake—it wasn't too dramatic though and I wasn't scared, and it didn't last too long—after the earth stopped moving, I stood up and ran back to the riverbank to look for the turtle with the portrait of Van Gogh on its shell.
Shome Dasgupta is the author of seven books, including The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, Spectacles (Word West Press) and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press)—he lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.
Photo by Shome Dasgupta.