I

The crack in Diewerke's kitchen wall runs from the window frame to the ceiling in a line so clean it looks deliberate. Like someone drew it there. It works its way around the stone, lays bare mortar and dried up insulation. He notices it's grown wider since last week but doesn't say anything. She pours coffee and sets the pot on the counter and the counter is not level and the pot slides toward the window, to settle an inch along. Neither of them mentions that either.

"Yours is today," she says.

"Two o'clock."

"A woman?"

"A man. Vermeer, or Vermeulen. Something like that."

"Mine was a woman. Very young. Very concerned." Diewerke sits down slowly, one hand on the table edge. "She wrote everything down. The cellar. The cracks. The door frames. She measured the crack with a little laser."

"And?"

"Category two. Big settlement."

She adds in a strained voice, higher than her own, "Conditional on relocation within eighteen months."

He drinks his coffee. It's good. She buys the same brand she's bought for thirty years, the cheap one in the red bag from the supermarket that isn't there anymore.

"I signed it," she says. "Gave the money to Klaas and Henny. Klaas is looking at a place for the kids."

He nods. This is sensible.

"I'm not going anywhere," she adds, and this is also sensible, and requires no response, so he finishes his coffee and looks at the crack and thinks about what filler would hold in a wall that's still moving. Nothing. Nothing would hold. You'd fill it on Monday and on Wednesday it would open again, a mil to the right, like a mouth with something to say.

II

The village has fourteen houses and four people. That's him, Diewerke, old Smit who is ninety-one and will die here because no one has managed to explain the buyout scheme to him in a way he considers relevant, and a woman from Enschede who bought the old schoolhouse eight years ago as an art studio and comes up on weekends. The other ten houses are empty. Some are boarded up. Some just sit there, scaffolded and strutted, without purpose.

The cracks don’t run at random. He’s noticed that. They follow lines that don’t exist anymore—old drainage cuts, his father once told him, from before the land was flattened. You can’t see them from above. Only when things start to come apart.

The church closed six months ago. The café closed before that. The nearest supermarket is in Loppersum, which is half an hour by bike on a road that was resurfaced after the big quake and is already cracking because of settling substrate. After rain, he could see the water following the old road, settling into patterns most people had forgotten.

He has lived here his whole life. Fifty-seven years. His father worked in the fields before the gas came and at the pumping station after. He himself did pipe-fitting for a subcontractor until his back made that impractical, and now he does odd work, less and less of it, in a radius that grows smaller as the villages around him thin out. His wife moved to her sister's in Groningen four years ago. She calls on Sundays. She'd like him to come. He'd like her to stop asking.

The ground here has been sinking for a long time. Peat harvesting brought canals, which in turn dried out the soil. That wasn't intended. It just happened. Then from the gas extraction. Failing pressure below made the earth settle. Moved what sat atop it. Things that can't bear being moved.

He thinks about it the way he thinks about his knees — something that wears, something you adjust to.

III

The man from the compensation authority arrives at ten past two in a silver Volkswagen that he parks carefully on the road rather than the driveway, perhaps because the driveway has a crack running across it wide enough to catch a tire. He's not young. Forty maybe. Neat jacket. Polite.

"Mr. Vos?"

"Ja."

"I'm from the Mining Damage Institute. We spoke on the phone."

He opens the door wider and lets the man in and they stand in the hallway where the floor slopes visibly from left to right. The man — Vermeulen, it turns out — takes out a tablet and begins.

They walk the house. Vermeulen photographs the cracks, the buckled door frames, the place where the plaster has separated from the brickwork in the upstairs bedroom. In the hallway he pauses. Runs a finger along an older crack that's been filled and sanded and painted over. Then looks at the raw separation in the bedroom doorframe, fresh and untouched.

"You've repaired before," he says. "This one you left."

He doesn't answer. Vermeulen waits a moment, then notes something on his tablet and moves on.

In the cellar he photographs the waterline on the wall, three centimeters higher than last spring. He places a small device on the floor and reads a number from his phone and writes it down.

"The subsidence here is significant," Vermeulen says.

"Yes."

"Have you experienced the tremors?"

"Sometimes."

"And the water in the cellar — when did that start?"

"It was always damp. The water started two winters ago."

He points at the struts braced against the pantry wall and ceiling.

“That one will go next,” he says, nodding toward the far wall.

Vermeulen looks up. “There’s no visible damage there.”

“Not yet.”

Vermeulen pauses, then nods.

He is thorough. He opens every door and notes which ones stick and which swing open on their own. In the kitchen he places a marble on the counter — he carries one for this purpose, apparently — and they both watch it roll to the east wall and tap against the tile.

"I'll file category two," Vermeulen says. "Possibly three. That depends on the structural assessment, which would be a second visit."

"Fine."

"The settlement would allow for relocation to —"

"I'm staying."

Vermeulen looks at him. Not with surprise exactly. More the look of someone who has heard this before and has a paragraph for it.

"You're entitled to stay, of course. But I should note that the structural integrity —"

"The structural integrity has been declining since '63," he says. "I was born here."

He doesn't say it sharply. It's just information. Vermeulen writes something on his tablet and thanks him and goes back to his silver Volkswagen and drives away on the cracked road, and he stands in the doorway and watches the car until it's gone and then the landscape is just landscape again, flat and wide and quiet, the way it should be.

He makes coffee. The pot slides on the counter. He drinks it standing up, looking out the kitchen window at the field behind the house where the drainage ditch has widened on its own over the past three years, the peat banks softening, darkening, returning to what they were before someone decided they should be anything else.

IV

He hears it on the radio while collecting bottles for the shopping trip. The minister is talking about the cement program. Final closure of the gas field. Permanent sealing. A gesture of national responsibility.

He ties his shoes and turns the radio off.

The ride takes longer today. Forty-five minutes there. Headwind. It's too long but he does it every three days because that's how it is now. The road is flat — everything is flat — and the wind comes from the west as it usually does and pushes against him on the way out and helps on the way back, which seems fair.

He talks to his wife on the bike. It’s not a dialogue. She sighs, says the fields are too empty, the distances too long, the days too quiet. She’s right.

He remembers the bench behind the house, the one that sank on one side so they sat angled toward each other without noticing. She used to bring coffee out in the evenings. They would watch the land soak up the rain, hear the ditch begin to flow.

He knew when she moved in. He knew when she moved out. He belongs. She tried to.

At the supermarket he buys bread, eggs, cheese, milk, a packet of the thin biscuits Diewerke likes, and a half-liter of buttermilk for Smit, who can't bike anymore and won't ask but always accepts. He packs everything in the bike bags and rides home with the wind behind him and the sky doing that thing it does in early autumn, going wide and pale and too large for the land beneath it. Rain hadn't come. It will tonight.

He drops the buttermilk off at Smit's. The old man is watching television. They don't speak. He puts the carton in the refrigerator and leaves.

V

He cooks at Diewerke's because her stove works better than his — the subsidence has torqued his gas line enough that one burner barely lights. She watches him cook. Eggs, potatoes, some greens. Most of it from the vegetable garden behind her house.

A noise through the floorboards makes him look at her. He leaves the pot to simmer. When he comes back up, he washes his hands and continues to cook.

"Cellar pump was cycling too often. Had to clear it."

She eats slowly and not much.

"How was your man?" she asks.

"Thorough."

"Young?"

"Forty."

"A marble?"

"A marble."

She smiles. "Mine had a laser."

He clears the plates. She stays at the table with her hands around a glass of water. He sees that her hands are thinner than they were in summer, the glass heavy in them.

She puts the glass down.

"I want you to keep my house."

He dries his hands on the towel that hangs from the oven door.

"The gutters need doing before winter," she says. "And the cellar pump. Klaas said he'd come. He won't."

"Okay."

"I mean after."

“We’ll do the gutters first,” he says.

She drinks her water. He folds the towel and hangs it back on the oven door. The door is not level, so the towel hangs at an angle, and neither of them adjusts it.

He walks her to the bedroom. She is slow on the stairs and he stays behind her, not touching her, just there. She sits on the edge of the bed and he pulls the curtains shut and turns on the small lamp on the nightstand and she says goodnight and he says goodnight and he goes down the stairs that aren't level and through the kitchen that isn't level and out the door that sticks.

Outside, the sky is enormous, and the ground beneath him is doing quietly and patiently what it has been trying to do for a hundred years.

He walks home.