The last house on the left is the first to explode.
Ana is in her front yard tending to her flowers when she feels the earth shake. The sound is loud enough to bring her off her knees and search frantically for the source.
There, at the dead end of the street, a small mushroom cloud rises from a pile of rubble that used to be Mr. Petroskey’s house. She rushes to gather her children and bring them inside.
The children are frightened and excited and it’s hard to wrangle the three of them.
“What was that?” Thomas asks. He’s always the inquisitive one. The other two are just screaming to make noise. Ana has trouble remembering their names.
“I don’t know,” Ana says.
Toward dusk, she ventures back outside alone to see if any neighbors are out, to see what they can make of what happened. All she finds is Mr. Petroskey’s head at the base of the mailbox.
She goes back inside to alert the police. They tell her they’ll get to it when they can. The children, their adrenaline long spent from the earlier excitement, are already sleeping soundly. Ana pours a bourbon and sits on the couch and watches all the news she can, but nobody mentions the explosion.
The next morning, Ana is surprised to see Mr. Petroskey shambling confusedly down the street. She goes outside and approaches him. His head is on backward. She tries not to appear disturbed.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Have you seen my house?”
She wonders if she should tell him or not.
“I think—”
“Is your husband around?”
She was going to invite him into the house until this.
“No,” she says. “He left.”
“Left?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t see how you can help me.”
Suddenly, Ana realizes she doesn’t like Mr. Petroskey. Never liked him. He was misogynistic and overly patriotic in a weird, self-serving way, mainly so he could wave guns at people from his front porch.
“Your house blew up. You don’t have a house anymore.” She wants to be more cutting but the guy’s head is on backward and the more she looks at the rough seam in his neck, the more horrifying she finds it.
He turns to look where his house used to be, the front of his body now facing her. He begins walking toward the smoldering heap of rubble. Ana goes back inside.
Shortly before noon, there’s another explosion. It’s not as loud inside the house, but the reverberations are even worse. The kids go wild. Ana steps outside to investigate. It’s Ms. Clausen’s house, three doors to the south.
Ana goes back inside and calls 9-1-1. They tell her they’re aware of the problem. She feeds the kids.
After eating, they relentlessly beg to go outside. This goes on for so long Ana doesn’t care if it’s dangerous or not. She lets them, telling them to stay away from the houses. Later, when she sees the kids laughing and playing with Ms. Clausen’s innards in the front yard, she makes them come inside and take baths. She doesn’t bother calling anyone.
The next morning, she wanders down to Ms. Clausen’s, kids in tow. The old woman always kept immaculate flowerbeds and Ana is planning on helping herself to what wasn’t destroyed in the explosion.
Ana moves close to an intact hydrangea while the kids stand on the sidewalk and pull each other’s hair. Ms. Clausen is down in the massive crater created by the explosion.
“Oh.” Ana is startled. “Ms. Clausen! I’m glad to see you’re okay.”
Ms. Clausen is down on her knees. “Little upset about the house,” she says, still focusing on digging in the dirt. She may not have any legs under her draped floral muumuu. “But I have so much more room for my flowers. Don’t know what I’m gonna do when it gets cold.”
Ana finds herself suddenly disinterested. She can’t offer any help since her husband left and the kids have eaten all her empathy.
“Well,” Ana says, “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
She uses very serious threats to wrangle the kids and take them back home. She wonders about Mr. Petroskey and Ms. Clausen. What it’s like to be shredded in an explosion only to re-emerge in a decimated version of your formal reality. It sounds horrible but maybe also … liberating? She wonders if the kids could survive an explosion.
Ana is woken the next morning by the house across the street exploding. It’s been empty ever since the previous owners were foreclosed upon. She no longer feels safe in the house. One of the younger kids is in the kitchen playing with some feces. After getting them cleaned up, she gathers some camping gear and tells them they’re all going to go camping in the yard.
On the second day of camping, Thomas asks why they can’t go into the house. She tells him it’s because it’s going to explode. It’s inevitable. This makes the kids less restless until anticipation takes over. She doesn’t even have to shush them like she does before a movie. They sit in their lawn chairs, the four of them, and spend their days white-knuckled, waiting for the house to blow up.
