Tornadoes, Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Floods, Plagues of Locusts



"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," Wikipedia



The 5' x 12' space outside my kitchen window -- the low roof on which several flowerpots of dying plants and a water bowl for the cats sit --  is strewn with carcasses.  If, that is, grasshoppers can be said to have  "carcasses" - and if two "carcasses" can be said to be "strewn."

Work with me here, people.



The perpetrator is my energetic ten-year-old tabby, famous for jumping on laps, licking faces, and gnawing on fingers with his gums, all of his teeth but the fangs having been removed for decay and only one remaining intact.  Last year, when he still had his one other fang (as far as I know), I watched him kill and eat an entire mouse.  It was horrifying, and yet I couldn't stop watching.  How on earth was this physically possible?





Toward the end of summer, a week apart, I find two dead sparrows on my living room floor.   One day, a week later, as I sit outside grading papers, my kitty excitedly runs toward me with a sparrow in his mouth and lays it at my feet.

I remember how perturbed my mother had been, back when I was eight years old and one of my cats had just  killed a sparrow.  One minute she's assuring us that cats could go to heaven too  -- because God can do whatever he wants to -- and the next minute she's squirming uncomfortably upon hearing that our house pet has committed blasphemy, responsible for the fall of the creature upon which God's eye is perpetually fixed. Luckily she becomes distracted by the fact that my four-year-old sister has apparently begun giving herself hickeys on the forearm out of sheer boredom  and is also calling our pet rabbit "honey buns."  Clearly Satan is at work here in more ways than one as the End Times approach.



Yet here I am, 31 years later and right after the hurricane that was so very destined to make landfall in New York City that the mayor himself had ordered evacuations along all waterfronts.  And now, later, in the aftermath, my cat cannot stop bringing live grasshoppers into the house, dropping them each just long enough to let them hop a few times before pouncing on them and pulling off one leg at a time as they die slowly.

Rather, I should say, he does eventually stop bringing them into the house, at which time I begin to find their carcasses strewn across the roof outside my kitchen window.

***



My ex-husband, before we had been married, had had a landlord who understood very little English and could ill afford to make expensive repairs to the two-story house, divided into and upstairs and downstairs apartment and situated practically directly beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, in a neighborhood that could have easily become known as DB2QE had it not later been declared to be part of Williamsburg.



When a heavy rain came one day, he had to explain to his landlord that the roof was leaking.  "Leak?" the man had asked him.  "Yes, it's leaking," Steven had responded, relieved to be understood.  "Leaking?" the landlord repeated.  "Yes, leaking," said Steven.  The landlord had thought a moment and asked.  "Leaking? Too much?" in response to which Steven had pretended to think a moment before responding, "Yes, too much.  Too much leaking."



Well, similarly, I can tell you that while I still have not identified the location of the breach in the roof upstairs -- apparently a small, noncommittal sort of rupture that over the course of a year slowly brought back the small, thin, brown water stain -- upon being beaten down by the torrential downpour of Hurricane Irene, began to leak.  Too much.  And my financial disposition is similar to the man in the story.  Thus, my contingency plan is simply to don a respirator and jumpsuit and crawl through the fiberglass insulation to drag a very, very large Rubbermaid container to a spot that should catch any future leaks until...until...until I...win the lottery.  Yeah. Until I win the lottery.  That's the plan, alright.



Something like the week before all of that, of course, had been the day when, as I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, I noticed the latched door bouncing in and out of the doorframe  of that room as though someone were standing on the other side and violently trying the doorknob to try to get in.



A seasoned homeowner by that moment, my initial thought, of course (before realizing it was an earthquake that was  causing the shaking), was, "My God; my house is going to collapse."





Then, upon returning to hear the word "earthquake" coming from the kitchen radio, my first thought was...well..."My God; my house is going to collapse."



Now, in this reverse series of End Times signs I've just reviewed, grasshoppers, of course, are not all that shocking  My Brooklyn back yard harbors all kinds of life -- most notably mutant killer mosquitoes, caterwauling toms with particularly acrid-smelling piss and a curiosity about how the other half lives, and tomato-plant-destroying snails and slugs.  Also overblown talk of the approach of Hurricane Irene only confirmed what I would say about hurricanes making landfall in New York City:  it just doesn't happen.  This was the first time in 17 years that I remember anyone even thinking that one would.  An earthquake in New York, though? And what about last year's tornado -- the one that blew the roofs off of several brownstones just two blocks from my house here in Bed-Stuy?  That left my storm windows intact but found one  lying on the floor upstairs, having been blown in by the tremendous wind? That picked up a large iron object in my back yard and slammed it down into the ground ten feet away from where it had stood?



My energetic little single-fanged gray tabby looks up at me for a second as if to answer -- and then goes back to the quotidian task of washing his behind.