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wasn’t just in her head. It would
be stupid to just stand there and be the only casualty, but then
she noticed the strange student whose name translated to “Bug Boy”
had not gotten under his desk. Instead he was moving quickly toward
her, very quickly—scuttling forward on too many legs, she thought.
He was at her side almost at once.
    He took her hand and said something in a
language that was not Japanese. She shrugged and tried to smile at
him but felt her smile flash on and off as the room continued to
shake. He pulled at her hand, and she let him lead her to the
classroom door. The earthquake seemed to be over by the time they
got into the hallway, but he was still pulling her forward
urgently.
    The aftershock hit just as Kameko and Bug Boy
got outside.
    So many things happened at once. The dark sky
was alive with the flapping and screaming of the big gangster
crows. The earth was shaking, and the tall buildings were swaying
from side to side. She pulled away from Bug Boy and put out her
arms for balance, but that did no good. She fell to the pavement.
She saw Bug Boy looking up at the sky and waving his arms. He’s got
his jacket on backwards she thought as it seemed to open out at
either side of his body just as the crows descended and covered him
completely. Kameko yelled for help, but no one came. She grabbed
her phone and called her grandfather, thinking it was a crazy thing
to do even as she was doing it.
    “Earthquake!” she shouted when she saw his
face on the little screen. “The crows!”
     
     
    3
    The Backyard
     
    When Cassie was alive she liked to tell the
story about how my backyard was in love with me and had tried to
sabotage our romance. She would tell about the night she came home
with me and first met the backyard.
    Yes, I had owned this house all those years
ago, and after I’d married Cassie, she and the backyard came to a
kind of détente. It remained my territory. It liked our boy Johnny,
but he never really felt comfortable back there. He knew the
backyard would be whispering in my ear about anything he got up
to.
    But that first night Cassie and the backyard
did not like one another. Okay, okay, I was flattered in a
perverted way over two women fighting over me, even if one of them
wasn’t strictly speaking a woman. In fact, I never ever referred to
the backyard as “her” while Cassie was alive. In those days, I had
a patio table out there on the deck with a couple of wonderful huge
white wicker chairs with comfortable cushions I was always careful
to bring in when I wasn’t using them so the Oregon rain would not
ruin them.
    I’d left Cassie sitting in one of those
chairs while I went inside for wine.
    I heard her squeak like she’d seen a bat or
something, and I’d yelled, “What?”
    “Nothing,” she’d called. I decided we could
use some snacks, too, so I put some cheese and crackers on a
platter.
    From Cassie’s viewpoint, things had not been
so serene. She used to describe the sudden drop in temperature as I
left her in the wicker chair. Branches snapped. Bushes shook as
creatures crept through them. Something scampered over her foot.
The patio light above the sliding glass doors dimmed. A sharp wind
shook everything and then just stopped suddenly leaving a wet, dead
smell floating in the air. A hummingbird flew down in front of
Cassie. She carefully raised a hand toward it. It dropped onto the
tabletop, obviously dead.
    “What?” I’d shouted.
    “Nothing!” she’d said.
    She didn’t know quite why she did it, but she
opened her bag and nudged the body of the dead hummingbird into it.
She snapped the bag closed and put it in her lap. I came out all
goofy smiles with the wine and the cheese and crackers. The air was
cool and sweet with the smell of spring flowers.
    Johnny married a wonderful woman named
Natsuki from Japan and they gave us a granddaughter, a beautiful
baby, my Kameko. But then a drunk driver killed both Johnny and
Natsuki. Natsuki had been an