"A couple" in both senses: M/M George and Carol Walsh, of what used to be 1110 Shoreside Drive in what used to be the Rock-fish Reach neighborhood of what once was Heron Bay Estates, in what manages to go on being Avon County, upper Eastern Shore of Maryland, USA 21600. Crushed and buried, they were, in the rubble of that not-unhandsome residence: two red-brick-sided, white-trimmed, black-shuttered-and-doored, slate-roofed stories, of which only the far end of one chimneyed exterior wall remained standing after the tornado had roared through the community into Heron Bay proper, where it waterspouted and then quickly dissipated in the adjoining Matahannock River. Their bodies (his more or less atop hers) not excavated therefrom until quite a few days later, when stunned survivors managed to tally the injured, review the roster of those known or thought to have been in residence, note the unaccounted-for, and attempt to contact next of kin while salvaging what they could of their own possessions, assessing their losses, and scrambling to make at-least-temporary new living arrangements for themselves. A traumatic business, especially for the elderly among us and most particularly for those without a second home or nearby relatives to take them in. No makeshift Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers for us Heron Bay Estaters, thanks!
"So?" you not unreasonably persist: Why should you care, other than abstractly, as one tsks at the morning newspaper's daily report of disasters large and small around the globe? And while you're at it, who's this "I," you might ask, the presumptive teller of this so-called tale, who speaks of "we" Delmarvans and "our" HBE? Am I perhaps, for example, Dean Peter Simpson of Stratford College, a Rockfish Reacher like the Walshes and, with my Ms., one of the hosts of that neighborhood's annual progressive-dinner parties, as were George and Carol? Or maybe I'm another George: that self-styled Failed-Old-Fart Fictionist George Newett, also from the College once upon a time and, with my Ms., erstwhile resident of what used to be HBE's Blue Crab Bight? George Newett, sure, why not, who… let's see… let's say… once upon a dozen-years-ago time permitted himself, to his own surprise and likely hers as well, a one-shot adulterous liaison with… guess who: Carol Walsh! In her early fifties she was back then, his fellow Heron Bay Estates Community Association member and, shall we say, ardent community servicer? Never mind the details. Or wait: Maybe I'm that Miz of his, the poet Amanda Todd, who (you know how it is with us poets) upon her husband's shamefacedly confessing his uncharacteristic lapse, sought poetic justice, shall we say, by bedding George Walsh in turn — or would have so done, except that that astonished and out-of-practice chap couldn't get it up even to the point of consenting to let her try getting it up for him?
Good tries yourself there, Comrade Reader — to which you might add the possibility that I'm Ellen Walsh, George and Carol's errant, Sapphic daughter! Ellen Walsh, sure: Early wire-ser vice reports of that freak Delmarva tornado reach my office at the Plain Dealer, followed by more specific accounts of a certain gated community's near-total destruction. I repeatedly phone both "home" and the HBE Community Association office, in vain: All phones in the area are out. No point in calling Uncle Cal and Aunt Liz in Virginia or Uncle Ray and Aunt Mattie in Delaware yet, who're no doubt making the same anxious, fruitless inquiries; soon enough they'll be phoning me, to hear what I've learned of Mom and Dad's situation. It occurs to me to try the offices of the Avon County News in Stratford, or maybe just hop the next flight to Baltimore/Washington International, rent a car, and get my butt over the Bay Bridge to HBE, since no matter what my parents' fate, I ought surely to be there to aid and comfort them, pick up the pieces, whatever. But — paralyzed, maybe, by some combination of anxiety, denial, anticipatory grief, self-pity, and who knows what else — to my own dismay I find myself staying put for a day, and then another and another. I turn off my phone-answering machine and decline even to answer the caller-ID'd attempts of aunts, uncles, and others to reach me, with whatever tidings, though for all I know some of the unidentified calls could be from my folks themselves, reassuring me that they're safe somewhere but needing my help. I go through the motions of my work, my "life," steering clear of the few officemates and "friends" who know where I grew up (i.e., in Stratford, back before HBE was built) and who might be wondering…
Nay, more, now that I think of it: I find myself staying put in the little apartment that I share with a ten-gallon tropical-fish tank and a past-its-prime computer and losing my fucked-up self in what I've long wished, to no avail, had been my true vocation, the writing not of interoffice memos but of serious-type fiction stories. Like maybe one about an only-child daughter who, coming to realize that she's a lez, leaves small-town Maryland after high school, goes to university somewhere Midwest, and returns thereafter only for dutiful visits to her parents — unlike the tale's author, who never left "home" but often wishes she had, instead of winding up as a sexless spinster in an entry-level Egret's Crest condo partly financed by her folks and miraculously spared by Giorgio's tornado. A tornado that never actually occurred, it occurs to her to imagine, except in her heartbroken, wish-granting imagination — wherein, while she's at it, she fancies that she's only fancying that she "stayed behind" in Avon County! Or, on the contrary, that she long ago left it and never moved back…
Thus do I find myself by losing myself: While the directors of Tidewater Communities, Inc., at their next board meeting, observe a moment's silence in honor of their late colleague and his Mrs., and then debate the pros and cons of rebuilding Heron Bay Estates — weighing the projected (and environmentally ruinous) ongoing population surge in the Chesapeake Bay region against the recent nationwide slump in new and existing home sales and the predicted hyperactive hurricane seasons, with their attendant steep hikes in H.O. and flood-insurance premiums—"I" invent a pleasant, "eco-sensitive" gated community called Heron Bay Estates, replete with a natural preserve, recreational facilities, good neighbors and Peeping Toms, toga parties and progressive dinners, neighborhood- and community-association meetings, house renovations and teardowns, adulteries and suicides — the works. Sometimes I almost get to thinking that the place is real, or used to be; even that I am, or once was. Other times, that I dreamed both of us up, or anyhow that somebody did.
In whichever case (as happens), B followed A, and C B, et seq., each perhaps the effect, at least in part, of it's predecessors, until…