Splitting the Atom

You said you were literally breaking up. I thought you were faking until the foundations started leaking and the water from the divide came rushing up the basement steps, rippling with crickets you’d crushed and the rats that could swim. Everyone was jumping ship by that time, not just the rats. Jesus, the hairdresser, Abraham Lincoln, our all American heroes said a house divided against itself shall not stand. If you couldn’t stand, maybe you could swim. But when I asked you, even the crickets were silent. You had stomped them into submission. Without them, there wasn’t much left to crunch on. I was hungry, but you couldn’t hear me anyway; the telephone cord was pulled taunt between the two halves of the house. When the last cricket hopped onto it, the wire snapped like an exoskeleton, or a wishbone. When the crickets stopped singing in the silences between us, I started to wonder what the roof beams were fastened with. I used to hold the corners shut with my nails, but now even nails wouldn’t stop the bones from clicking apart along the perforated edge. The water was rising,; we wished we could burst free: tongues, face, feet, flowing out the gutters. With all the crickets dead, there was no one left to laugh.