The story opens in a tense period of waiting. A couple and their young, unexpected but very present child are holed up in a cabin in the middle of a storm after two weeks without heating, and a pine tree is threatening to fall on nearby power lines. There’s a glaring sense of powerlessness, of incompetence in the face of uncontrollable events whose consequences could (should) have been ameliorated by past action. How did we get here? And who can save us now? These questions and their accompanying fear, regret, longing, and uncertainty are the pulse of the story, which beats harder the closer it gets to going out.

The husband hadn’t gotten around to applying sealant, and now rainwater is seeping into the house. The couple had a surveyor assess the power lines, but, as noted by the climber, they hadn’t been properly managing the trees. The husband sees his own situation in that of the wasp motionlessly clinging to a rope in the storm. For him, “It was possible to believe only that some outside agency had stilled the wasp. It was not possible to believe that the thing had cast itself into that state.” Some avoidable situations are so needlessly horrible that we’re shocked to identify ourselves as the cause. Jones shows us an outsider’s perspective—the husband’s on the wasp—in a way that encourages self-examination. If we objectively examined the state of our own lives, or of human life generally, what about them would we have a hard time believing we caused? And are we trying to address them, or are we curiously stilled?

Even when we can’t blame an “outside agency” for our own situations, we still often look to (or wait for) outside agencies to solve them. The couple waits for the engineer, the assessor, the tree surgeons, and, at the end, someone to come take care of the other pine trees. Climate change is just one of many problems that most people are waiting for someone else to take care of. At the same time, there are problems we know no one else is coming to solve. In Jones’s story, a turbulent domestic drama plays out alongside the action of the storm. The couple’s marriage has been tested by their child, whose presence has impacted the maintenance and regular functioning of their relationship. There’s a distance and unfamiliarity between them—when the husband speaks to his wife for the first time, the wife isn’t there to hear him; later, we learn that the husband has been sleeping on the pullout bed; and no one—husband, wife, or daughter—is named. There’s a brilliant dynamic between the husband, wife, and tree surgeons, with the surgeons’ calm, controlled competence presented in sharp contrast to the husband’s deficiencies. I love the climber’s “measured mouthful of tea,” and how the husband’s attraction to the climber’s competence is projected onto his wife. And while these “cracks” in the couple’s relationship would have once only impacted them, they have a daughter now—the water is “coming into her bedroom, too.” She’s impacted by the functioning of their relationship just as much as (if not more than) they are, and, ultimately, no one but the couple will be able to work it out.

The story’s most striking image is of the cattle being electrocuted in a wet field. Jones calls the image to mind several times throughout the story—the child’s farm-animal toys, the tree marks from the climber’s spikes that were like “bite marks in an animal’s neck,” the references to an ark—never letting the cows’ horrific end escape the reader’s mind. For the husband, the image is wrapped into a growing fear of the ground itself. It was the force in the wet ground that killed the cattle. The ground collapsed in on the burrowing rabbit. As noted by the climber, “It’s not the trees that go. It’s the ground.” What if the ground you walk on, the very foundation you rely on, were to become unstable or deadly? What, if not the ground, can be trusted? Raising a child in this state of uncertainty and instability arouses a primeval fear in the husband. It pulses through the story when, while watching his daughter sleep after the electricity comes back on, he sees the lines sparking and runs screaming to the climber and groundman, calling out for their salvation. They’re able to quell his immediate fear, but they—the knowledgeable and competent—won’t always be there.

Jones lulls us into a sense of quiet relief following the storm. A close call—nothing more. But the storms are more frequent and relentless now, and just as we were starting to breathe normally again Jones brings the pulse of the story to a frightening new height. The final scene’s overwhelming terror comes to us amid screams and flashing light, with the husband and child stepping off the ark and, instead of onto firm ground, “into deep crashing water.” No more safety and stability, only a feeling of immediate mortal danger punctuated by the story’s closing lines: “The cattle, catching fire. His tiny child in his arms.”

In large part, we remain asleep to so many of the existential dangers we’ve blindly leveled on ourselves, waiting for and reliant on others—human or divine; some sort of death-defying ark—to keep the ground beneath our feet and keep ourselves from going under. What will it take to wake us up?

Read “Pulse,” by Cynan Jones, in The New Yorker.