Pink
Copyright© 2023 by Old Man with a Pen
Chapter 2
Pink and Mauve
There was a faint sound off toward Charleston ... kinda like those Civil Defense sirens that they used to test about once a month. She came awake looking for a school. desk to hide under. Then the shark alarm at the park and she was REALLY awake now. She fumbled with the radio alarm clock.
Said the radio, ‘Tsunami Warning. Evacuate to higher ground.’
A massive trembler at the Mid- Atlantic Ridge normally signifies a wider split. The under water mountain range widens and there is a slight drop in the ocean level as the seawater fills in the hole. There wasn’t a human in sight the last time the ocean floor humped ... it had been 17 or 18 thousand years since a genuine tsunami inundated the North Hemisphere shoreline ... and nobody would have noticed if there had been someone around to notice. The oceans were a lot shallower then ... all that water frozen as ice made for a much farther out shore ... well ... the impossible had finally happened ... a hump instead of a drop.
“Miss Hastings? Miss Hastings!” The local National Guard Commander called. His Jeep was at her gate.
She came to the stoop, “What do you want, Joshua?”
“Evacuate to higher ground!”
“In case you hadn’t noticed ... I am higher ground” ... and she was. Pink and Mauve was a good hundred and twenty feet above the shore.
The worst storm surge had never wetted so much as a stick of her veranda latticework. A force five wind gust of 145mph had blown the railing on the widow flat but that was as close as Pink and Mauve had ever come. These old craft built homes were sturdy. The only home ever damaged was the new construction three houses north ... and it was rebar reenforced concrete. The empty ‘shell’ was still there.
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