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One minute, nothing, and the next, the seventh plague: hail pounded the house like a rioting crowd and smashed the car into tin foil. It turns out totaled means total loss. The hail was bigger than a ping pong ball but smaller than a baseball. I don’t know the exact size, only the destruction.

 

A week earlier, my husband sprayed the wasp nest under the eaves with a foamy stream of insecticide. A hundred stings can kill you. If you get too close, they mark you with pheromones and chase you down. They’re always looking for a fight and a hole to fill.

 

Over sixty years ago, the US government blew Bikini Atoll to Hell, detonating twenty-three nuclear devices over twelve years, including two atom bombs and a hydrogen bomb. Before that, they blew up a desert in New Mexico. J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the bomb, said, Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. After Hiroshima, he said, I carry no weight on my conscience. He said many things. In 1967, he died of throat cancer.

 

Fifteen million years ago, a meteor crashed in the mountains of eastern Europe and exploded with the power of many hydrogen bombs. A hydrogen bomb is a thousand times more powerful than an atom bomb. It was a good thing no one existed yet.

 

Fifteen million years ago is an approximation. Carl Sagan said millions, billions, trillions because a year doesn’t matter on a universal scale. All we know is the sky is full of stars, some of which are meteors, some of which are bombs.