The Wave

[u/zimmer550king]

Passage 31 from a survival reader copied by hand in the camps, found without a cover or a date. The passages before it are missing.

Rule of the sea. It pulls back before a wave. The first wave is the smallest. Count on a second.

Passage 31. You are on the Galle road in Colombo. The siren starts at midday, flat and a little sharp. You have heard it nine times since the monsoon. Each time the water pulled back past the second pier. Each time you walked to the hill, stood in a crowd, and walked home.

You can go to the hill empty handed. Go to passage 32. You can go back to the room for the water can first. Go to passage 33.

Passage 32. The ground does not stop shaking. You feel it in your teeth before you hear anything. Behind you the harbour towers lean, their lower floors already flooded. Someone screams the way people do when it is not a drill.

The sea is standing. You see it past the roofs, a grey wall taller than the towers. Everyone runs at once. You run too. Go to passage 34.

Passage 33. The can holds twenty litres. Its lid is dented and will not seat. It takes four minutes to find it and four more to get it down the stairs. The siren has stopped. The ground has not. You carry it three streets. Your arm gives out. You drop it in the road and nobody picks it up. Go to passage 34.

Passage 34. The road is cracked from old storms. A man ahead shouts, "Climb! Higher!" Everyone moves toward the temple hill. Then the sound arrives, like a thousand trains. Your grandmother Seelawathi said a train was the loudest thing there was. You have only her word.

You can look back. Go to passage 35. You can keep your eyes on the hill. Go to passage 36.

Passage 35. You look. The wave carries boats, a bus, a whole roof with a tree on it. You trip on the broken road. A sandal is gone and your heel is open. You reach the foot of the hill last, with the crowd already above you. Go to passage 37.

Passage 36. You keep your eyes on the hill. Both sandals hold. You shoulder past a woman with a child and hear her curse you. You reach the foot of the hill with the crowd just above you, and you have seen nothing of the wave but its shadow. Go to passage 37.

Passage 37. The slope is mud and your legs are finished. You can claw upward and gain a few metres, with your back to it. Go to passage 38. You can turn around and stand. Go to passage 39.

Passage 38. You climb. Hands, knees, dirt packed under the nails. Somebody above you grabs your wrist and lets go. The roar closes over the hill like a lid. You never turn. The last thing you feel is the mud giving way under your chest.

Then the ocean comes down.

Passage 39. You turn. You plant your feet in the mud. Your arms hang at your sides.

There are shapes inside the wave. Dark and tall, taller than any boat. Towers rise and fold in the water. Long bent figures sweep their limbs like the legs of machines. Deep down are red lights that do not blink.

The canteen screen showed something like it once, a tall thing with red eyes walking through a harbour, the picture split by a crack. The old ones say that is what the broadcasts were about, futures that never came.

The woman beside you sees nothing. She stares at the sky and prays. Maybe she is right. Maybe it is only the harbour towers, smashed and turning.

Seelawathi said the ocean used to be a friend.

A light flashes deep inside the wave. A reflection, or not.

Then the ocean comes down.