The buried dragon
The television was already on when Michael came down the stairs.
A woman in a grey blazer was standing in front of a weather map, her hand moving across a gradient of blues that deepened toward the northeast. *—anomalous drop in temperature, with readings expected to fall well below seasonal averages. Residents in affected regions are advised—* She smiled in the way anchors smile when the news is not good but the segment is ending.
Michael walked past the screen without looking at it.
In the kitchen, Diane was already at the counter, her back to him. The kettle had boiled. The toaster clicked twice and released two slices at once, the same as every morning. She took them out with her fingers and placed them on the plates without burning herself.
“Morning,” she said, not turning.
“Morning.”
He took the butter from the fridge. She took the coffee from the cupboard. Their movements did not collide.
They sat across from each other at the small table by the window. Outside, the street was still grey. A neighbour’s car was running, unattended, producing a steady white column of exhaust that rose and dispersed into nothing. Diane ate her toast in quarters. Michael drank his coffee before touching his.
“—bracing for what meteorologists are calling one of the most significant cold fronts in recent—”
“Did you pay the electric?” Diane asked.
“Yesterday.”
“Okay.”
She reached for the jam. He passed it without being asked. The spoon inside was clean; she had washed it the night before. She spread a thin layer and did not offer him any. He did not want any.
On the television, the woman in the grey blazer had been replaced by a man in a darker blazer, who was saying something about a shipping delay at a port. Neither of them listened.
The clock on the microwave read 06:47.
Diane finished her coffee first. She stood, rinsed the cup, and set it upside down on the drying rack. Michael stayed at the table with the last corner of his toast.
“You have that call today,” she said. It was not a question.
“Ten.”
“Alright.”
She went into the hallway. He heard the closet open, the rustle of her coat, the small metallic sound of the hanger settling back against the rod. He ate the last corner of his toast.
06:52.
She came back in with her coat on and her bag over her shoulder. Her hair was pulled back. She looked at the counter, then at the hook by the door, and picked up her keys. They made the sound keys make.
“Cold today,” she said.
“So they say.”
She crossed the kitchen and leaned down. Her lips touched the corner of his mouth, dry, brief, familiar. Her hand rested on his shoulder for the length of the kiss and then did not.
“See you tonight.”
“Drive careful.”
“I will.”
The front door opened. The front door closed.
A moment later, the car started in the driveway. He listened to it reverse, pause, and pull away down the street. The sound faded into the low hum of the refrigerator and the voice on the television, which was now discussing something about a local road closure.
Michael finished his coffee.
He carried both plates to the sink, rinsed them, and left them in the rack next to her cup. He turned the television off on his way past it. The screen held a faint afterimage of the weather map for half a second and then went black.
He went upstairs.
The office was the second door on the right, the smaller of the two bedrooms before they had decided not to need the larger one for anything in particular. The desk faced the window. The window faced the back garden, where the grass was stiff with frost and a single magpie was standing very still on the fence.
He sat down. He pressed the power button on the tower. The monitor woke in stages — black, grey, the soft blue of the login screen. He typed his password without looking at the keys.
The browser opened to the tabs he had left the night before.
Twitter first. He scrolled. A journalist he half-followed was arguing with someone he did not follow at all. A football result. A photograph of a dog. An advertisement for a mattress. He scrolled past all of it with the same small motion of his thumb on the wheel.
Then email. Seventeen unread. Fourteen were newsletters. One was from his bank, confirming a transaction he recognised. One was from a client, postponing something he had not been looking forward to. One was from an address he did not recognise, and he marked it as spam without opening it.
Then Reddit.
His usual subs loaded in the usual order. A thread about a film he had not seen. A thread about a book he had read and disliked. A post at the top of one of the smaller subs with a title he registered and did not register, the way the eye registers a street sign at speed.
He clicked somewhere else. He read a comment. He scrolled back up.
The radiator under the window made the small ticking sound it made when it was warming.
Outside, the magpie was gone.
He reached for his coffee before remembering he had left it downstairs.
He began with email.
The seventeen had become eighteen while he was scrolling. He worked from the top down, the way he had always worked.
The bank confirmation he filed into the folder marked *Finance/2026*. The client postponement he replied to in three lines, agreeing, proposing two alternative windows, thanking them. He did not re-read it before sending. The newsletters he opened in sequence, skimmed the first paragraph of each, and deleted. A software company wanted him to upgrade. He archived it. A conference he had attended two years ago wanted him to attend again. He archived it. A mailing list he did not remember joining offered him a discount on something he did not want. He clicked *unsubscribe*, waited for the confirmation page to load, closed the tab.
One from his accountant, forwarding a document and asking him to sign it by the end of the week. He flagged it.
One from a man he had gone to university with, asking if he was free for a coffee when he was next in the city. He starred it and left it in the inbox.
One from the building management company, about a planned maintenance to the water supply on a date he had already noted. He deleted it.
He worked through the rest the same way. Flag. Archive. Delete. Reply. Archive.
When the inbox showed three unread, all of which he had decided not to deal with yet, he stopped.
06:58.
He opened a new tab. He opened the document he kept for the day’s tasks. It was a plain text file, not a notes app, not a project manager, just a .txt he had been editing and overwriting for longer than he could remember. He deleted yesterday’s list. He began typing.
*10:00 — call, Reinhart*
*draft outline, section 3*
*invoice — Meyer*
*respond Kowalski*
*groceries*
He looked at it. He moved *invoice — Meyer* to the top. He moved *draft outline, section 3* below it. He deleted *groceries* and retyped it at the bottom in lowercase, as a reminder rather than a task. He saved the file.
He opened the outline document in another tab. Section three was where he had left it the night before, a paragraph half-finished, a bracketed note to himself that read *[rework — too direct]*. He read the paragraph. He did not rework it. He closed the tab.
Twitter had refreshed. The journalist was still arguing. Someone had replied to a comment he did not remember making three days ago. He read the reply. He did not respond. He closed the tab.
07:01.
He opened the client’s postponement again to check that he had sent it. He had. He closed it.
He opened his calendar. The ten o’clock was there, in blue. A dentist appointment next Tuesday, in grey. Diane’s birthday at the end of the month, in the colour he had assigned to her years ago and never changed. Nothing else that week needed attention.
He opened Reddit again.
The same threads were at the top of the same subs. The post he had registered and not registered was still there. He did not click it. He went to a different sub and read four comments on a photograph of a kitchen renovation. He upvoted one of them without thinking. He closed the tab.
He opened the outline again. He typed one sentence. He deleted it. He typed it again, slightly differently. He left it.
07:04.
The radiator ticked. Somewhere in the house, the boiler cycled on and then off. A car passed on the street below, slowly, its tyres making the wet sound tyres make on a road that is not wet but has been.
He opened his email. The three unread were still there. A fourth had arrived, from a retailer, which he deleted without opening.
He opened the task file. He added *pick up dry cleaning* and then, after a moment, deleted it. He saved the file.
He opened Twitter. He closed Twitter.
He opened Reddit.
The small red dot appeared in the corner of the tab.
He moved the cursor toward it without hurry, the way he moved the cursor toward everything, and the notification unfurled in its small grey rectangle at the top of the screen.
*r/prophecy — new post*
07:07 He clicked.
The post opened alone on the page. No title above it. No image. No flair. A single block of text, centred.
u/Encausse_34 • Posted just now
The buried dragon wakes beneath the stone, Where towering pride has pierced the quiet sky, The deepest roots will give a sudden groan, And dust will choke the ruins where they lie.
He read it.
He read it again.
There were no comments. The vote count was at one, which was the post itself. The subreddit name at the top of the page was *r/prophecy*, which he did not remember subscribing to and did not remember unsubscribing from either. He scrolled up to check. It was in his feed. It had been in his feed.
Beneath the quatrain was the username. -u/Encausse_34- Posted just now
He clicked it.
The profile loaded. A default avatar, grey on grey. No display name. No bio. Account age: three days. No other posts. No comments. No trophies. No karma beyond the single point from the post he had just read. The sidebar was empty in the way new profiles were empty, the way most profiles were empty, the way nothing in particular was empty.
He clicked back to the post.
*The buried dragon wakes beneath the stone,*
He scrolled past it to see if there was anything beneath, a second post, a caption, a link. There was not. The page ended where the quatrain ended.
He opened a new tab. He typed the username into the search bar. The results offered him a surname he did not recognise, a French village he did not recognise, a nineteenth-century occultist he vaguely did. He did not click any of them. He closed the tab.
He went back to Reddit.
The post was still there. The vote count was still one. No one had commented.
*Where towering pride has pierced the quiet sky,*
He read the line again without meaning to. He read the one after it.
*The deepest roots will give a sudden groan,*
He closed the tab.
The task file was still open behind it. *invoice — Meyer.* *draft outline, section 3.* *call, Reinhart.* *respond Kowalski.* *groceries.* He looked at the list. He did not add anything. He did not remove anything.
He opened the outline document. The bracketed note was where he had left it. *[rework — too direct].* He placed the cursor at the end of the sentence he had not finished the night before. He did not type.
*And dust will choke the ruins where they lie.*
He moved the cursor into the middle of the sentence. He deleted a word. He retyped the same word. He saved the document.
07:11.
He opened his email. Nothing new. He opened his calendar. Nothing had changed. He opened Twitter. The journalist had stopped arguing. He scrolled a short way and stopped. He went back to the tab he had closed and opened Reddit again.
The post had not moved. *u/Encausse_34.* Two minutes ago had become six.
*The buried dragon wakes beneath the stone,*
He read the whole thing a third time, slowly, the way one reads something in a language one almost knows. The rhythm was clean. The rhyme was exact. It did not mean anything to him.
He minimised the window.
The desktop appeared behind it. A photograph he had taken two summers ago of a coastline he could no longer remember the name of. He looked at the water for a moment. He opened the window again.
The post was still there.
He clicked away from it, to the front page, to a thread about a film he had not seen, and read three comments without absorbing them.
*Where towering pride has pierced the quiet sky.*
He scrolled. A photograph of a dog. A political headline. A joke he half-understood. He upvoted nothing. He scrolled back up.
07:16.
Outside, a second magpie had joined the first on the fence, or the first had come back. They stood apart, not looking at each other. The frost on the grass had not yet begun to melt.
He reached for the coffee that was not there.
*The deepest roots will give a sudden groan,*
He sat very still at the desk, his hand resting on the mouse, the cursor blinking somewhere he was not looking, and the line finished itself in his head before he could decide whether to let it.
*And dust will choke the ruins where they lie.* The comments began to arrive.
The first appeared while he was still looking at the post. A single line, posted one minute ago. *ok nostradamus.* He refreshed. Three more had appeared beneath it.
*hit the bong harder bro*
*dragon ball z leaked script*
*is this a haiku that didnt finish counting*
He refreshed again.
*“the deepest roots will give a sudden groan” — same thing my back does every morning*
*the buried dragon wakes beneath my stone, where towering taxes pierce the quiet sky*
*remindme! 10 years*
The thread was finding its shape. He scrolled. A comment in all caps, unpunctuated, which said the poster was clearly fourteen. A reply to that, which said the poster was clearly forty. A reply to that, which was a single emoji of a crystal ball.
He refreshed.
*Either this person is high, or we should actually be paying attention.*
The comment sat between a pun about drywall and a GIF of a man in a wizard hat falling over. It had two upvotes. He read it. He scrolled past it.
Lower down, a user had written a longer reply, three sentences, saying the meter was unusually clean for a shitpost and that the iambic line-ends rhymed *ABAB* without forcing, which, they wrote, was harder than people thought. Someone had replied *touch grass.* Someone else had replied *no actually they’re right.*
He refreshed.
Four new comments. A limerick. A parody quatrain about a pizza. A one-word comment that said *lol.* A user asking what subreddit they were in and whether it was satire.
He scrolled back up to the post itself.
*The buried dragon wakes beneath the stone,*
*Where towering pride has pierced the quiet sky,*
*The deepest roots will give a sudden groan,*
*And dust will choke the ruins where they lie.*
He refreshed.
The vote count had risen. Thirty-one. Fifty-two. He was not watching the number so much as noticing when it changed. The comments had doubled. He scrolled through the new ones without stopping on any of them. A user had posted a photograph of a lizard. A user had written *this reads like ChatGPT had a dream.* A user had written, more quietly, *whatever this is it’s well-made.*
He did not upvote.
The ten o’clock call happened. He took it at the desk with the tab still open behind the video window. Reinhart spoke about the quarter. Michael answered in the places he was supposed to answer. When the call ended he clicked back to the thread before he closed anything else.
At some point he made coffee. At some point he drank it. The cup sat on the desk to the left of the keyboard, and then it was empty, and then it was there still empty, and then he carried it down to the kitchen and filled it again and carried it back.
The thread grew.
A user had begun a thread-within-a-thread, pointing out that *Encausse* was a surname associated with a French occultist, and that 34 was possibly a département number, and that this was therefore either a very committed bit or a very boring one. The comment had sixty-four upvotes. A reply beneath it said *you people will find patterns in a bowl of soup.* It had eighty.
He refreshed.
*buried dragon = my student loans*
*guys i think he means the oil pipeline*
*i’ll bite. what towers. what roots.*
*no towers where i live, pray for me*
*this has the exact energy of the last post before someone gets arrested*
He scrolled.
The front door opened downstairs.
“Hello.”
“Hey.”
He heard her coat come off. The hanger. The closet. Her bag set down on the bench by the door. Her shoes, one and then the other. She came into the hall and went into the kitchen and the tap ran and stopped and the kettle was filled and clicked on.
He did not get up.
After a moment the stairs sounded and she appeared in the doorway with a glass of water in her hand.
“Working?”
“Sort of.”
She looked over his shoulder at the screen. He did not close the tab.
“What’s that?”
“Something on Reddit.”
“What is it?”
He read it aloud. He read it without inflection, the way he read things aloud, four lines, the buried dragon, the towering pride, the deepest roots, the dust and the ruins.
She listened until he was done.
“Who wrote that?”
“Someone. No one. I don’t know.”
She laughed once, short, through her nose. “Tell them to lay off the mushrooms.”
“Yeah.”
“Dinner at seven?”
“Yeah.”
She went back down. The stairs sounded in reverse. The kitchen noises resumed, cupboard, plate, tap. He returned to the screen.
The post had three hundred and eleven upvotes. The comment count had passed four hundred. He began at the top and scrolled.
*this is the most effort anyone has put into nothing all week*
*ruins where they lie — nice double meaning, lie as in deceive*
*nah lie as in recline, it’s literal, bodies*
*touch. grass.*
*OP hasn’t replied to a single comment. chef’s kiss.*
He refreshed.
New comments. A user had run the quatrain through a meter analyser and posted the result. A user had asked if anyone else thought the phrasing felt translated. A user had replied *translated from what.* A user had replied *exactly.*
He scrolled further.
Someone had cross-posted it to a larger subreddit. He clicked through. The comments there were the same comments, faster, louder, the same jokes arriving in the same order, the wizard hat, the back pain, the student loans, the *ok nostradamus*, which seemed to appear almost as a formality now, the way a certain word appears at the start of a certain kind of prayer.
He came back to the original thread.
The quatrain was still at the top. *u/Encausse_34* had still posted nothing else.
He refreshed.
The light in the office had changed. The window, which had been grey and then pale, was now the colour windows are in the late afternoon in winter, which is not a colour so much as an absence of one. The magpies were gone. The radiator had cycled twice. His second coffee had become cold in the cup without his noticing and he had not made a third.
He refreshed.
*still no response from OP*
*maybe OP is the dragon*
*maybe OP is the stone*
He scrolled to the top and read the quatrain again, out of habit now, the way one checks a lock one has already checked. He did not upvote. He did not comment.
Downstairs, a pan was set on the hob. The extractor fan came on. The smell of onion began to climb the stairs in the slow unhurried way smells climb stairs in a house where dinner is always at seven.
He refreshed.
The vote count had risen again. The comments continued. The thread did what threads did, which was continue until it did not, and he sat at the desk and watched it continue, and the window went from the colour of late afternoon to the colour of early evening without any moment in between that he could have pointed to. He got up from the desk at some point before dinner. His legs were heavier than he expected them to be. He went down the stairs slowly and put his phone in his pocket on the way.
Diane was at the stove. Pasta. The onion had become something else by now, garlic, tomato, the small dried leaves she kept in the jar with the faded label.
“Five minutes,” she said.
“Okay.”
He set the table. Two plates. Two forks. Two glasses. The water jug from the fridge. The napkins they never used but always put out. He stood at the counter for a moment afterward with his hand on the back of the chair and took out his phone and unlocked it and opened Reddit and scrolled and locked it and put it back in his pocket.
She turned off the hob.
They ate.
“How was the call?”
“Fine. They want the outline by Friday.”
“Can you do it?”
“Yes.”
She twisted pasta onto her fork. He ate his without twisting. The television in the next room was on, low, a voice he was not listening to talking about something he was not following. A game show, probably. The rhythm was a game show rhythm, the rising and falling of a host’s voice, a small pause, a small burst of applause.
“There’s more if you want.”
“I’m good.”
He took out his phone under the edge of the table, thumbed the screen awake, opened Reddit, scrolled, closed it, put the phone face-down beside his plate.
“Eda called,” she said.
“Mm.”
“Her sister’s visiting next weekend.”
“Okay.”
“We might go for lunch.”
“Okay.”
She finished before he did. She took her plate to the sink and rinsed it and came back for his when he was done. He let her. He did not offer to help. She did not expect him to. She came back with the small dish of something sweet she had made yesterday, two spoons, and set it between them.
They ate it from the same dish.
Afterward, they moved to the sofa. She had the book she was halfway through, a hardback with a grey cover, a woman’s name on it he had heard her say but not read. She curled her legs up and leaned against him. He put his arm along the back of the sofa and then, after a moment, down onto her shoulder.
The television was still on. A cooking programme now, two people in an outdoor kitchen doing something with fish. Neither of them was watching.
She opened her book.
He picked up his phone from the arm of the sofa. He unlocked it. He opened Reddit. The thread had four thousand and something upvotes now. The comment count had a *k* after it. He scrolled a short way. The jokes had begun to repeat. New users were arriving at the post and making the same jokes the earlier users had made, and the earlier users were making the new jokes tiredly, the way a room tires of a song. He locked the phone. He set it on his thigh.
Diane turned a page.
Her hair smelled of the shampoo she had been using for years, something with coconut in it. Her weight against his side was familiar in the way weight against one’s side becomes familiar, which is to say it registered as absence when it was not there and as nothing when it was.
He picked up the phone. He unlocked it. He opened Reddit. He scrolled. He locked it.
“Cold,” she said, and pulled the blanket from the back of the sofa over both of their legs.
“Mm.”
“Did you hear about the thing with the heating in Erol’s building?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you later.”
She read. He looked at the television. The two people were plating the fish. One of them said something the other one laughed at. The audience, which may or may not have existed, laughed a moment later.
He picked up the phone. He unlocked it. He opened Reddit. The thread was still there. The quatrain was still at the top.
*The buried dragon wakes beneath the stone,*
He locked the phone.
He put his hand on her shoulder properly now, and she made the small sound she made when a gesture landed correctly, half a hum, half nothing, and turned a page.
On the television the programme ended and another one began. The news at nine. A man at a desk. A woman beside him. The headlines of the day, delivered in the ordered way headlines of the day were delivered, politics, economy, a court case in another country, a weather segment promised for later in the broadcast.
He picked up the phone. He unlocked it. He opened Reddit. He scrolled. He locked it.
Diane shifted and settled more deeply against him. Her eyes were moving across the page in the rhythm he knew. Left to right, down, left to right, down. He watched them for a moment. He looked back at the television.
The man at the desk was saying something about the cold front. A graphic had appeared over his shoulder, the same gradient of blues from the morning, deepened.
Diane read.
He picked up the phone. He unlocked it. He opened Reddit. He locked it.
21:03.
The man at the desk moved on to a story about a minister. The woman took the next story, something local, a school, a funding issue. Diane turned a page. Her thumb rested briefly at the corner of the paper before she let it fall.
21:05.
He picked up the phone. He did not unlock it. He set it on the arm of the sofa.
On the television, the woman finished her sentence and the man began his, and then he did not. His mouth closed. His hand went to the small device in his ear. The studio lighting did the small shift studio lighting does when a producer has said something in a raised voice somewhere off-screen.
The graphic behind him changed.
A red band slid across the bottom of the frame.
21:07.
Diane looked up from her book. The red band settled.
*BREAKING.*
The man at the desk recovered his mouth. His hand came down from his ear. He looked at the camera and then at something past the camera and then at the camera again.
“We are — we are receiving reports, at this moment, of a significant seismic event in the Middle East. Details are still coming in. We will bring you more as we have it.”
The woman beside him was already looking at the monitor in front of her.
“We’re being told,” she said, “a major earthquake. We do not yet have a magnitude. Initial reports are suggesting — initial reports are suggesting the epicentre may be in the region of the Persian Gulf.”
“We want to stress,” the man said, “that information at this stage is fragmentary.”
A map appeared on the graphic behind them. A red dot pulsed in the water, offshore, between coastlines. The dot was placed and then re-placed a few hundred kilometres further east and then placed again.
Diane had closed the book without marking the page.
“We are now being told,” the woman said, reading from the monitor, “that the preliminary magnitude is being reported in the range of — we are getting different numbers here. I want to be careful. The figures we are seeing range from 8.4 to above 9. I want to repeat that these are preliminary and unverified.”
The man said, “We are going to try to go to our correspondent in the region.”
They did not go to their correspondent in the region. The screen held on the two of them. The woman turned a page of the notes in front of her that had not been the notes she had started the broadcast with. The man touched his ear again.
“We are receiving,” he said, “we are receiving reports of structural damage in several coastal cities. We are not in a position at this time to confirm casualties. I want to be clear. We are not in a position to confirm casualties.”
21:14.
“We have reports,” the woman said, “of damage in Bandar Abbas. In Dubai. In Abu Dhabi. In Doha. In Manama. We are receiving these reports through wire services and social media. We have not independently verified them.”
The man said something to the woman that was not picked up by the microphone. She nodded once.
“We are also,” she said, “we are now receiving reports of a tsunami warning that has been issued for the entire Gulf coastline. That warning has been issued in the last several minutes. We are trying to establish the source.”
Diane had not moved.
21:21.
“We are going to show you,” the woman said, “some footage that has just come in. We want to warn viewers that this footage is unverified and that the images may be distressing.”
The studio cut away.
The footage was vertical. Someone’s phone. The frame shook and then steadied. It was night, or nearly night, the sky above was the colour of something burning in the distance, a low orange without a source. The camera was pointing along a street. At the end of the street there should have been a building. There was not a building. There was a shape that was not a shape. A column of dust standing where a column of glass and steel had been standing, holding its own outline for a moment before beginning to lean.
The camera moved.
Another building, still standing, had a face missing. The floors inside were visible, furniture intact on some of them, absent on others. A curtain was blowing outward from the twelfth or thirteenth floor into nothing.
The camera moved.
Water in the street. Not a flood, not yet. A rising. It came around the corner of a building and met itself from the other direction and rose against the windows of a car and lifted the car and set it down two metres to the left.
The camera moved.
The skyline, what remained of the skyline, was a line of interrupted verticals. Several of them were wrong. One of them, the tallest, the one that had been the tallest, was not there. A wide pale cloud stood where it had stood. The cloud was dispersing in the wind in the slow even way dust disperses.
The studio voice, over the footage: “This is — we are being told this footage is from Dubai. This is Dubai. We are looking at — we are looking at the site of the Burj Khalifa. We are — we understand — the structure appears to have — we are not in a position to confirm at this time.”
The camera moved again. A different clip. Aerial, low, unsteady, probably a helicopter or a drone.
The Palm. The shape of it was recognisable and not. The trunk of it was there. The fronds on the eastern side were there. The fronds on the western side were under water to the second storey of the buildings that had been on them. A hotel at the end of one of the fronds was leaning. As the footage continued the hotel continued leaning, slowly, the way a tree leans before it falls, and the footage cut before it finished.
“We understand,” the studio voice said, “we understand a tsunami has reached coastal areas of the city. We are — we are still trying to establish the scale.”
Diane’s hand had closed around his forearm at some point. He could not have said when.
21:29.
The studio came back. The man and the woman. Behind them, on the graphic, the red dot had steadied. The number beside it had steadied. *9.1.* The woman was speaking.
“We are being told the epicentre has now been located offshore, approximately one hundred and eighty kilometres east-northeast of Dubai. We are being told the depth was shallow. We are being told that is why the damage — that is why the damage is what it is.”
The man said, “We are receiving further footage. We are going to go back to it. Again, we want to warn our viewers.”
Michael did not look away from the screen.
He did not look at his phone. His phone was on the arm of the sofa where he had left it.
His mouth was dry in the way a mouth is dry when it has been open for some time without the person noticing.
He said, quietly, without any particular inflection, the way he read things aloud —
“The buried dragon wakes beneath the stone,”
Diane’s hand on his forearm did not move.
“Where towering pride has pierced the quiet sky,”
On the television, the footage of the Palm had begun again, from a different angle.
“The deepest roots will give a sudden groan,”
The hotel at the end of the frond was leaning.
“And dust will choke the ruins where they lie.”
The hotel finished falling. He reached for the phone.
The screen woke. The notifications had stacked. The small numbers beside the icons had grown since he had last looked at them. He opened Reddit.
The thread was at the top of his feed. Pinned now, by someone, in a sub that had not been pinning anything before. The vote count he did not read. The comment count had a different *k* after it than it had had an hour ago.
He scrolled.
The top comments were new. The top comments were always new, the algorithm did what it did, but these were new in a different way. They had arrived in the last twenty minutes. They were longer. Some of them were not jokes. Many of them still were.
*imagine being right by accident*
*still could be a coincidence. gulf has faults. not new.*
*someone call op*
*op has not been online for 14 hours*
*guys this is freaking me out a little*
*it’s a poem. it’s four lines. you could retroactively fit it to anything that happened today*
*“anything that happened today” bro the tallest building on earth just fell over*
*alleged*
*look at the footage*
*i have. it’s a big earthquake. big earthquakes knock things down. this is not prophecy this is geology with a delay*
He scrolled.
*i’m not saying anything but i’m not NOT saying something*
*the dust line. the dust line is specific.*
*the dust line is generic. every collapse has dust.*
*the roots line tho*
*tectonic plates = roots is a stretch*
*is it*
He scrolled.
*u/Encausse_34 please respond*
*op is the earthquake*
*op is in dubai*
*op is dead*
*op is french*
He scrolled.
A reply chain had formed beneath a comment by a user he had not seen in the thread before. *u/RoyD’effrayeur.* The top comment in the chain was three words.
*she knew it.*
It had two hundred and something upvotes. The replies beneath it were a mix of the same mockery from the rest of the thread and something else. He scrolled into the chain.
The user had continued, in their own replies to themselves, lower down.
*not saying prophecy. saying the image set is too coherent to be random. “buried dragon beneath the stone” = something dormant, subterranean. a fault line is dormant until it isn’t. the word “wakes” does work.*
*“towering pride has pierced the quiet sky” — this is the cleanest of the four. it’s a tower. towers plural probably. the word pride is doing two jobs, hubris and also the collective noun you use for a thing that stands together.*
A reply beneath: *touch grass.*
A reply beneath that: *let them cook.*
The user continued in a further comment down the chain.
*“the deepest roots will give a sudden groan” — roots as foundations. but also roots as what is below the foundations. the word groan is worth something. it’s not a crack, it’s a groan. it’s a sound that precedes movement. it’s the sound the ground makes in the seconds before.*
*“dust will choke the ruins where they lie” — aftermath. the choice of “lie” at the end is either very lazy or very deliberate. ruins lie. bodies lie. the word lies. all three are in the room.*
A reply: *bro wrote an essay*
A reply: *bro is correct*
A reply: *correlation is not causation you absolute wet sock*
A reply: *nobody said causation*
A reply: *then what did you say*
A reply: *i don’t know yet*
The chain went on. The user had posted one more comment, further down, shorter than the others.
*i don’t think this person wrote it tonight. i think this person wrote it before.*
Michael did not scroll past it. He held the screen still. He scrolled up a small distance and then back down to the same comment and read it again.
*i don’t think this person wrote it tonight. i think this person wrote it before.*
He scrolled.
The broader thread was faster than the chain. New top-levels were appearing at a rate he could watch. He refreshed. Twelve new. He refreshed. Nine more. The ratio of jokes to not-jokes had shifted, but the jokes were still there, and some of them were sharper now, the way jokes get sharper when the room is no longer entirely sure it is a joke.
*okay but what if the next one is my city*
*there isn’t a next one. there’s one. one poem.*
*check the profile. three days old. no other posts.*
*yet*
*yet is doing a LOT of work in that sentence*
*guys*
*guys it’s a coincidence*
*it’s a very specific coincidence*
*coincidences are specific. that’s what makes them coincidences.*
*i am going to bed*
*i am not going to bed*
*i will never sleep again, this is my life now*
He refreshed.
The shorter comments had begun to appear between the longer ones. Two words. Three words. Question marks on their own. A user he had seen earlier mocking the post had come back and written, simply, *okay.* It had forty upvotes.
On the television, the woman at the desk was still speaking. The graphic had updated. The number was no longer 9.1. It was not a number he could read from where he was sitting. A crawl at the bottom of the screen was moving through city names. He did not look at it directly.
Diane was looking at him.
“It’s a coincidence,” she said.
He did not answer.
“Michael.”
“Mm.”
“It’s a coincidence.” … “It must be a coincidence.”
He nodded, a small movement, once. The thread on the screen refreshed itself. Twenty-seven new comments. The top of the chain, still pinned by upvotes, still the same three words.
“she knew it.”
