I'm at my house, in my former bedroom which is now my office. It feels like morning, and there is somebody else there, but I don't remember who. The house suddenly pitches and rolls violently. I can see through the window, which seems very far away as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope, matted with deep black, and I can see the landscape tilting and shaking.

At first we don't know what it is, and then I call it out: "It's an earthquake!"

It's quickly over, and I go into the living room to see if there is any damage done. While I'm there, the earth again pitches, but this time in a gentle wave I can see through the front window, and I recognize it as an aftershock.

My fishbowls seem to have spilled, two small bowls in which I have three male bettas. I gather them up in the bowls, one in one bowl and two in another, but I've lost a lot of the water and I can't just put fresh water in there because of the chlorine. I see a tall glass (one of the Pom glasses I have at home) half-full of water that I was drinking several days ago, and I pour that in the fishbowls, since the chlorine would certainly have evaporated by now.

But when I look away, and look back, one of the bettas is on the floor, and squirming away from the bowl. I grab it with my hand, and it bites me a little but I put it back in the bowl. Then a minute later it's out again, and I put it back in, again getting bitten. Then I notice that it's being attacked and bitten by the other betta in that bowl, and that's why it keeps jumping out. Oh yes, I remember, these are fighting fish, and you can't put them in together. But I had two of them together - maybe they were raised as brothers. Maybe they weren't paired right. So I put the escaping fish in the other bowl, and that doesn't work either. Maybe the ones that were brothers have forgotten each other since they got spilled. In any case, this fish is getting more and more damaged from the others attacking him, so I decide I'd better just put him in a glass for now, and I gather up whatever standing water is around in glasses. It's not enough water for him, but it's fine for now, so I can let him recover.

(It doesn't seem to have occurred to me that the two brothers might have been the two that were in the bowls, and the escaping one was one that had always been alone. This might have been because the two fish never left their bowls, I don't remember.)