The Voice Inside

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Frost Easton felt a shiver in the house, which jolted him from a deep sleep. He assumed it was the beginning of an earthquake.

His eyes shot open, blue and wide. In an instant, he was off the sofa, where he typically slept, and on his feet in the chill of his Russian Hill home. His black-and-white cat, Shack, sensed the disturbance, too. Frost saw Shack frozen on the coffee table, with his back arched and his tail puffed like the bloom of a bottlebrush tree. He waited for the ground beneath them to shudder like a fun-house ride.

This was San Francisco. Tremors routinely shook the city with a rumble of subterranean thunder. Most came and went without doing damage, but he’d lived through the deadly Loma Prieta quake when he was only eight years old. You never knew when the next Big One was coming. However, Frost saw none of the telltale signs of a temblor this time. His sister’s blue angel figurine, which was hung from a hook above the bay window, didn’t sway. The empty Sierra Nevada beer bottle he’d left on the coffee table hadn’t walked itself to the edge and tipped over onto the carpet.

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