Never Saw It Coming    Adrienne Dyane Lewis

Any minute a house may fall on me.

I’ve felt that way all week. Driving through

eerie, green Michigan summer haze, the danger of it

happening seems imminent though.

The Wicked Witch of the West never saw it

coming, but I do. I have the guy, the kid, and the place

(though it really isn’t ours yet). I even have the dog.

Life only stays perfect for a little while and like some

country song whining on a car radio before a wreck, I

can hear the catastrophic melody in each drop of horizontal

rain that hits my windshield.

When I was little, I loved Dorothy Gale. Before

my sister was old enough to join us, I can remember

lying on my parents’ bed with my mother and

watching the movie on our 9-inch black and white TV.

It was years later that I found out the movie had scenes

in color. We watched until it seemed to be very late at

night and my father came in to tell us that the news was

coming on or that he needed another drink made. The

only time during the movie that I thought of running to

the living room to crawl in his lap was when the flying

monkeys attacked.

Now I’m the mother and I’ve made sure my son

has his own copy of the film. My husband only sits

down to watch it with us on family nights when the decision

isn’t his to make. I can tell he likes the monkeys:

their ugly audacity in bringing the group the

broomstick just an hour after their merciless dismantling

of the scarecrow.

He doesn’t know that I feel this way: Scared all

the time. Lying in bed at night, I tell him it’s the heat

that keeps me awake. "Close your eyes," he says, "Go

to sleep." I try, but the truth is that I’m thinking about

all the things that could go wrong in my life until they

begin to swirl above me, weightless. I open one eye

and then another to see him lying next to me breathing

in sweet rhythms. He looks wonderful.

This isn’t Kansas. Those aren’t wonderful wizards

stopped alongside I-75. And no one is handing

out brains, hearts, and courage today. It’s the drive at

five. And everyone else is pulling off the road because

for them this is the first time they’ve felt the peril of

becoming her, thought about watching their ruby slippers

disappear under the footing of a stray house.