Thirty-Seven Mississippis

The dust tasted like concrete and old prayers.

Alma's right leg was pinned beneath what used to be a beam from the ceiling—she couldn't tell anymore. Everything looked the same in the dark: gray, broken, wrong. The earthquake had lasted maybe forty-five seconds. She'd counted. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, like her lola (grandma) taught her during typhoons when Alma was small and afraid of thunder. Count between the lightning and the roar, lola said, and you'll know how far away the danger is. But this danger had been directly beneath them, rising up through the earth itself.

The building had held for thirty-seven Mississippis before the third floor decided to meet the second.

That was four hours ago. Or five. Maybe six. Her phone was somewhere in the rubble, still ringing with her mother's call. She'd heard it earlier, felt the vibration like a distant heartbeat pulsing through the debris. But it had stopped now, the battery finally giving up, and the silence felt worse than the ringing had. At least the ringing meant the world outside still existed, that people were still trying to reach her.

She wasn't alone, exactly. Ten feet away, she could hear Kuya (big brother) Elio breathing—shallow, wet sounds that scared her more than the aftershocks. He'd been the building supervisor, making his evening rounds when the shaking started. He'd pushed her under the doorframe just before the ceiling came down. She owed him her life, though she couldn't tell him that now. He'd stopped responding an hour ago. Or two. Time moved strangely in the dark, stretching and compressing like something alive.

Through the rubble, she could hear voices from the street—fragments of conversation carried on the wind that somehow found its way through the wreckage. Someone was crying, a raw sound that made her chest tight. A radio crackled nearby, tinny and distant. A reporter's voice, steady and professional, announcing numbers that made her stomach turn: dozens dead across Bogo, more in San Remigio, Medellin. A sports complex had collapsed during a basketball game; spectators crushed in their seats. A village built for typhoon survivors, destroyed again. The numbers kept climbing—fifty, sixty, seventy.

"Still here, Kuya," she said anyway, her voice hoarse from dust and screaming, trying to drown out the litany of loss. "They're coming for us. Just hold on."

The words felt like lies wrapped in hope, but she said them anyway because what else was there?

Her water bottle had been in her bag, which was somewhere she couldn't reach. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She tried to gather spit, but there was nothing. The thirst was becoming harder to ignore than the pain in her leg, which had gone from screaming agony to a dull, distant throb. She wasn't sure if that was better or worse.

Alma had been working late, finishing the quarterly reports her manager needed for Monday's meeting. She remembered being annoyed about it, remembered thinking how unfair it was to work through a Tuesday evening when everyone else had gone home. She'd give anything now to be annoyed about spreadsheets and deadlines. She'd give anything to be bored.

The earthquake had come without warning. They never gave warning. The emergency drills at the office always started with an alarm, orderly evacuation routes, assembly points in the parking lot. But the real thing started with the building groaning like an animal in pain, the floor rippling like water, the lights flickering and dying. Alma had frozen, her hands still on her keyboard, her mind refusing to process what was happening. And then Kuya Elio was there, yanking her out of her chair, shoving her toward the doorway.

She remembered the sound most of all. Not just the building collapsing, but the collective scream of everyone inside it—a chorus of terror that would probably live in her bones forever.

If she got out of here.

When she got out of here.

Above her, she could hear voices now. Different from the street sounds. Closer. Muffled but urgent. The groan of metal being moved, piece by piece. Someone shouted something about a support beam, engineering terms she didn't understand. Another voice called for silence, and for a moment everything stopped—the digging, the voices, even her breathing.

Alma tried to scream, but her throat only managed a croak. She swallowed, winced at the pain, tried again.

"Here! We're here!"

The voices stopped. Alma's heart stopped with them.

Please, she thought. Please.

Then—"Did you hear that?"

"Down there! Someone's alive!"

Alma started crying, the tears cutting clean paths through the dust on her face. Her hand found a piece of rebar, the metal cold against her palm, and she banged it against the concrete above her head. Once. Twice. Three times. A signal. I'm still here. We're still here.

The sound echoed in the small space, and she heard the voices above erupt in activity. Footsteps. Radio chatter. Someone giving orders.

Through her tears, she thought of all the others—hundreds injured, thousands displaced, sleeping in the streets because they were too afraid to go home to their damaged houses that might collapse in the next aftershock. Families waiting outside overwhelmed hospitals, hoping for news. The tent cities that would rise from this wreckage, rows of temporary shelters for people who'd lost everything.

Her city had been through so much already. Typhoon after typhoon, year after year, and always the people of Cebu rebuilt, replanted, returned. Her lola used to say they were made of the same stuff as bamboo—flexible enough to bend in the storm, strong enough to spring back after. But how much bending could anyone take?

Kuya Elio's breathing hitched, caught, continued.

"Stay with me, Kuya," she whispered. "They're coming. They found us."

She didn't know if he could hear her, but she kept talking anyway, her voice a thread in the darkness. She told him about the rescuers, about the voices above. She told him about her lola's bamboo metaphor, about typhoons and earthquakes and how they'd survive this too. She told him anything to fill the silence, to keep the darkness from pressing too close.

"Hold on!" a voice called down, and it was so clear, so close that Alma almost sobbed with relief. "We're coming to get you. Just hold on. What's your name?"

"Alma!" she called back. "Alma Reyes. And Kuya Elio—he's hurt bad. Please hurry."

"Alma, I'm Carlo with the fire department. Can you move?"

"My leg is trapped. But I can move my arms."

"Good. That's good, Alma. We're going to get you out, okay? But we need to work carefully. The structure isn't stable. Do you understand?"

She understood. She understood that careful meant slow, meant hours more in the dark, meant time for things to go wrong. But she also understood that rushing meant the rest of the building could come down on all of them.

"I understand," she said.

"You're doing great. Keep talking to me, okay? Tell me about yourself. Where are you from?"

It was a trick, she knew. Keep her talking, keep her conscious, keep her mind occupied while they worked. But it was a kind trick, so she let herself be tricked.

"Born in Argao," she said. "Moved to the city for work. I'm an accountant."

"Yeah? My wife handles our finances. I'm terrible with numbers."

"It's not so bad once you get the hang of it."

They kept talking, his voice her lifeline in the dark. He told her about his two kids, showed her their pictures through the crack they'd opened in the rubble—she couldn't see much, just a sliver of light and the hint of faces on a phone screen, but it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

Time passed. Above her, the sound of work continued—cutting, lifting, bracing. Sometimes they had to stop when an aftershock hit, everyone freezing, waiting to see if the building would hold. Each time it did, Alma breathed again.

Alma closed her eyes and thought about Sunday morning, before any of this. Her mother frying tuyo in their small kitchen, the smell mixing with sampaguita from the flower vendor down the street. The jeepney horns and the church bells competing for airspace. The way Cebu woke up singing, bright and loud and alive. She thought about her apartment, the plants on her windowsill that were probably dead now. Her cat, Pablo, who was hopefully safe with her neighbor. The book she'd been reading, left face-down on her coffee table at page 237.

All the small details of a life she'd taken for granted.

She held on.

The dust settled around her like a promise: this too would be cleared away. This too would be lifted. Piece by piece, hour by hour, they would dig through this catastrophe until they found everyone who could be found.

Above, the voices grew louder. Closer.

"Alma, we're almost there," Carlo said. "I can see your hand."

She looked up and saw it—a gap in the concrete, wider now, and through it a sliver of sky. Still dark, but real. The stars invisible through the dust and city lights, but somewhere up there, Cebu was still turning. Still breathing.

Alma banged the rebar again, not as a signal this time but as a prayer.

She held on.

And when the hands finally reached her, when the light from their headlamps found her face and she heard Carlo say, "Got you, Alma, we got you," she closed her eyes and let them pull her back into the world.