Acts of Nature

breathing shallow but steady, her eyes at half-mast, almost like she was simply taking a lolling rest after one of her long-distance runs.
    “You OK?” I asked stupidly. “I mean, shit, how long have I been out?”
    She didn’t respond at first and seemed to be looking out past me into the gray light.
    “OK,” she finally whispered and then focused on my eyes. “I’m OK, I didn’t know what to do, Max. No place to go.”
    I moved my arm, aimed my hand, found the side of her temple with my fingertips and stroked the side of her face.
    “Jesus, Sherry. You OK?”
    Maybe she was smiling at my denseness, but the corners of her mouth turned up, just a fraction.
    “Hell of a night,” she said. “It’s morning, but I can’t get up.”
    She reached down with her left hand but only got to her hip and stopped. She had a rag tied around her thigh, tight from the look of it. The torn piece of sheet and the fabric of her sweatpants were stained a rust color. I sat up, felt a spin in my head like I was a kid on the tilt-a-whirl for a second, and then moved down without too much pain to Sherry’s leg.
    “Puncture?” I ask, probably hoping for something minor.
    “No. It’s broken.”
    “Compound?”
    “Yeah,” she said. “Thigh bone came right through the skin on the interior side. I thought my muscles were stronger than that, that they would’ve kept it in.”
    She was a cop. We’d both spent a lot of time at accident scenes gabbing with paramedics, picking up their medical cant.
    “I was trying to drag you over here after the side wall ripped away,” she said. “My foot must have gone right through a split in the flooring. I fell over and the bone just snapped.”
    I was staring at her face, trying to comprehend what she was telling me.
    “When I felt for the pain I found the bone with my fingers. But I had to move, get us over. When I pulled my leg back out of the hole, I must have pulled the bone back in because it’s not exposed anymore.”
    “Christ, Sherry.” It was the only thing that came to my lips.
    “When I got us a little out of the wind I was going to use your shirt to tie it off but a bedsheet came whipping by like I’d ordered the thing from room service.”
    Levity, I thought. She could have been crying, instead she was cracking jokes. Her blond hair looked almost brown, drenched and stringy with shards of wind-blown sawgrass stuck in it. Her face was smeared with dirt and streaks of her own blood wiped there from her hands. I was looking in her eyes for some sign of trauma or shock that just wasn’t there.
    “I’m OK, Max. I passed out a couple of times but it feels kind of dead right now. I’m not sure that’s going to last if I try to move, though.”
    Sherry’s brave suggestion motivated me to roll over to my own knees and then, slowly, gain my feet. There was an uneasy shift in my brainpan, like a load of water in a tub tipped from one side to the other, but I maintained my balance and the feeling passed.
    In the dim light, I took in the shredded remains of the Snows’ fishing camp. The western wall that we used for shelter and a quarter of the south wall were still standing. The two others were completely gone, like they’d been ground to mulch or simply sailed away. Glops of wet stuffing from the couch and the bed had been whirled and splattered onto anything that was still vertical: the refrigerator, the cabinet fronts bolted into the standing wall, the now pristinely empty bookcase that was equally nailed to the quarter wall. I took a couple of steps on the floorboards and heard glass crunching under my feet. Past the bookcase, into now free space, I could see the outbuildings, which appeared to have been de-roofed and then simply folded over like wet cardboard boxes. The large water tank, easily four or five hundred pounds when filled, was tossed thirty yards out onto Wally’s now bald island. Several planks from the extensive deck had been peeled up with no discernible pattern and the walkway looked like a broken, haphazard piano keyboard. The air smelled of dank, sopping detritus, like the earth itself had been turned by some monstrous tiller and flopped back down on top of us. Looking out toward the south I could only see fifty or sixty yards in the grayness; the plain of sawgrass was flattened, as if by a steam roller. A few thicker, hardier stalks were just beginning to rise up like stubble after a mean harvest. There was civilization out there, the edges of