this was actually a dream of mine. though i changed the setting and characters some.
i didn't really intend for this to be an artistic masterpiece, it was just kind of my way of writing out what was plastered up on my brain.
i halfway wanted to keep going with it but i realized it was sort of an apocalypse story, and i'll be damned if i keep up with that most-popular cliche of today.
anyway, woop.
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The only warnings we received were twittered in minutiae, which most of us picked up only in hindsight. I personally wouldn't have noticed anything, except that my bored and roving eye had decided to wander to the clock on the wall to the right of me. Caught in my peripheral vision was the head of the Keith Richards bobblehead propped up on my desk (a gag gift for singing "Take it So Hard" at an office karaoke night after slipping into several martinis). Keith's shiny plastic skull was wiggling and shimmering on its spring so quickly I couldn't make out the poorly-painted wrinkle lines around the absurdly pouty lips. But that really was all; after catching that glimpse, all I had time left to do was to mimic the doll's pursed expression in wonder.
It started as a quiet warble. It felt as if something very far away were sounding off, and the sound just hadn't hit us yet. The tremble on my desk escalated into a full vibration. The knick knacks and office supplies on peoples' monitors and workspaces were taking swan dives onto the floor. The hens all around me began to cluck stupid, answerless questions. I had been in an earthquake before, as a kid in San Francisco, and that memory was my reaction. That balmy night in early September, the night before school began, when the pictures of my friends started falling off my shelves and the snow globe from Disneyland broke on the side of a standing lamp. I had held fast to my mattress with all the strength that the world could afford a nine year old girl. And that's what I was translating now, nineteen years later. The cubicle's foam-padded walls were shaking the more violently than anything, and the flourescent light on the ceiling above zapped out a warning, so I lunged under the workstation and clung to a short filing cabinet. It was welded to the cubicle's structure, and uttered low, metallic meows with the movement.
"Earthquake!" I shouted, and was struck mute mid-speak. On the heels of the tremor came a cacophony which was paled only by its aftershock in magnitude. I made the stupid mistake of taking my hands off the cabinet to clutch my ears. The thin, dingy office carpet bucked beneath me and connected my skull with the particle board of my desk's underside. I flailed and grabbed out for the cabinet again, but my hands swiped nothing, and in my stupor I noticed the ceiling above. Somehow I had been displaced.
When I was nine, the earthquake that had hit my little home had only lasted for about ten seconds, then sputtered and died. There was no quieting this furor, however. Time always seems to expand in a crisis and shrink in a memory, but this was definitely longer, there was no mistaking it. I clutched the floor fibers and clawed back to the cabinet. The shaking had caused a sensational blindness. Shapes and colors which had once had form swiped up and down like fat fresco strokes on greasy glass. I could see Darren--or, what appeared to be a jagged wave-form of Darren's ghost--as he squatted like a nesting duck, holding dumbly onto a fat black blur that I figured was his desk chair. All our chairs had wheels on them, and his was motoring around in circles as its passenger kept clumsily reigning it in. All the other chairs, including mine, had fallen on their sides.
The ceiling, which consisted of those whitewashed corkboard panels, began to wriggle loose from their flimsy aluminum grid, and hail down on us. Years of dust which had collected on top of them was freed, and it sworled around, glittering in my vibrato vision. Had I thought or ability enough to breathe, I would have been choking. One of the panels fell directly onto Darren, but he seemed to pay it no mind. Actually, its added weight was stabilizing him a little better.
The floor, finally, had peaked in its crescendo of quaking, and began to slowly dwindle in severity. The quake in San Francisco had finished with a sputter and just died, as if in mid-sentence. This one, however, kept rumbling, fading gradually back to normal. The problem of the noise, however, persisted. Now that the ground was quieting, it was only giving the microphone over to whatever had caused it. It was still a rumble, but a distant one. It carried more treble, and was more tinny and grating. As my vision started to normalize, I focused in on Darren, who had collapsed onto the seat of his flighty anchor, with a blanket of corkboard pinning him to it. He was vomiting onto the seat, something brown and green and awful, and I couldn't make out the sound of it at all.
"Are you okay?" I shouted at him, using the full force of my voice. My words sounded like little muffled chirps inside my own head, and Darren didn't respond to them. A hard, hot stone of nausea settled into my belly as well, but I swallowed it down, and began the 6-foot journey to his side. My muscles were so jarred, joints so stiff, bones so achey. It felt as if blood were pouring out of my ears. I touched one and was horrified to feel wetness there. But then the sensation of coolness trickled into my brain (which was still ten minutes behind and trying to sprint back to the present). My shirt was clinging to me and something salty rolled into my eyes. The sprinklers, was all my mind could eke out. And while it was partially right, it wasn't giving me the whole story: the pipes for the sprinkler system overhead had broke open, and water was gushing, unchecked, into the desk space connecting Darren's and my cubicles together. Our computers would have been quite the electrocution hazard, were it not for the fact that the power had gone out in the turmoil.
After a painful century's crawl, I reached my coworker. His scraggly dark hair was clinging to his face, and his stomach was hanging nude out of his shirt, covering his belt. He wasn't precisely fat, not what I would call fat--more doughy, rather, akin to the later days of Orson Welles. He had finished saying farewell to his lunch, but was still immersing his cheek in it. I grabbed his shoulder in a frantic way, and pulled myself to my knees. The earth hadn't finished its bellow, and the sick on the chair was jiggling like pudding. The walls dipped and swayed. The pain in my head chose now to put on its evening wear and strut in stiletto heels all over my frontal lobe. I grabbed at Darren's slumped shoulders, but they wouldn't move. Either that, or all my strength was gone. So I focused my effort on the ceiling panel draped over him, and with a mighty shove, I knocked it back under his desk behind him. He roused at this point and raised his head to look at me, bewildered, slop running down his cheek.
"Are you okay?" He said to me--mouthed, rather, since the outside noise was still too greedy to afford us any decibels.
I was confused. I had come to his rescue, why would he ask me if I were alright?
A swell of nausea bubbled up in my throat and its gravity sucked me back into a crawling position. The earth's rancor was only just a vibration now, but my vision seemed to still be playing jump-rope. My eyes started to become heavy; I was incredibly sleepy. The unpleasantness of the wet clothes, the overbearing rumbling boom, and being in a cold, dirty puddle began to lose its repulsiveness. All I wanted to do was vomit and sleep.
"Oh god, I think it's …" I mouthed to Darren, and trailed off. I had momentarily forgotten the word I was looking for.
He took himself off the chair, and latched onto one of my shoulders. He was staring at me with some mix of horror, worry, and exhaustion.
My averted eyes caught sight of a puddle beneath me. It was wriggling about in the tremor, sending scatters of reflections, and it was pink in color. Something red was rolling off of me--but I didn't have time to process that, or care.
A great WHOOSH! walloped the roof of the single-story building of Pepperdin Staffing, Inc. Even through the crashing rumble outside, was it audible. So, too, were the faint, sharp tinklings of the remaining windows breaking. The daylight, which had severely dimmed already, was choked out entirely, and all that was visible were the faint, red emergency-backup lights directly overhead. A heavy white cloud blossomed in from outside, descending upon us. As it fell, a flurried blanket of silky dust and debris coated everything within eyeshot. The agitated puddle beneath me turned into potato bisque.
But it ceased to matter. I simply laid down and drifted into a deep sleep.
i didn't really intend for this to be an artistic masterpiece, it was just kind of my way of writing out what was plastered up on my brain.
i halfway wanted to keep going with it but i realized it was sort of an apocalypse story, and i'll be damned if i keep up with that most-popular cliche of today.
anyway, woop.
-----------------------------------------------
The only warnings we received were twittered in minutiae, which most of us picked up only in hindsight. I personally wouldn't have noticed anything, except that my bored and roving eye had decided to wander to the clock on the wall to the right of me. Caught in my peripheral vision was the head of the Keith Richards bobblehead propped up on my desk (a gag gift for singing "Take it So Hard" at an office karaoke night after slipping into several martinis). Keith's shiny plastic skull was wiggling and shimmering on its spring so quickly I couldn't make out the poorly-painted wrinkle lines around the absurdly pouty lips. But that really was all; after catching that glimpse, all I had time left to do was to mimic the doll's pursed expression in wonder.
It started as a quiet warble. It felt as if something very far away were sounding off, and the sound just hadn't hit us yet. The tremble on my desk escalated into a full vibration. The knick knacks and office supplies on peoples' monitors and workspaces were taking swan dives onto the floor. The hens all around me began to cluck stupid, answerless questions. I had been in an earthquake before, as a kid in San Francisco, and that memory was my reaction. That balmy night in early September, the night before school began, when the pictures of my friends started falling off my shelves and the snow globe from Disneyland broke on the side of a standing lamp. I had held fast to my mattress with all the strength that the world could afford a nine year old girl. And that's what I was translating now, nineteen years later. The cubicle's foam-padded walls were shaking the more violently than anything, and the flourescent light on the ceiling above zapped out a warning, so I lunged under the workstation and clung to a short filing cabinet. It was welded to the cubicle's structure, and uttered low, metallic meows with the movement.
"Earthquake!" I shouted, and was struck mute mid-speak. On the heels of the tremor came a cacophony which was paled only by its aftershock in magnitude. I made the stupid mistake of taking my hands off the cabinet to clutch my ears. The thin, dingy office carpet bucked beneath me and connected my skull with the particle board of my desk's underside. I flailed and grabbed out for the cabinet again, but my hands swiped nothing, and in my stupor I noticed the ceiling above. Somehow I had been displaced.
When I was nine, the earthquake that had hit my little home had only lasted for about ten seconds, then sputtered and died. There was no quieting this furor, however. Time always seems to expand in a crisis and shrink in a memory, but this was definitely longer, there was no mistaking it. I clutched the floor fibers and clawed back to the cabinet. The shaking had caused a sensational blindness. Shapes and colors which had once had form swiped up and down like fat fresco strokes on greasy glass. I could see Darren--or, what appeared to be a jagged wave-form of Darren's ghost--as he squatted like a nesting duck, holding dumbly onto a fat black blur that I figured was his desk chair. All our chairs had wheels on them, and his was motoring around in circles as its passenger kept clumsily reigning it in. All the other chairs, including mine, had fallen on their sides.
The ceiling, which consisted of those whitewashed corkboard panels, began to wriggle loose from their flimsy aluminum grid, and hail down on us. Years of dust which had collected on top of them was freed, and it sworled around, glittering in my vibrato vision. Had I thought or ability enough to breathe, I would have been choking. One of the panels fell directly onto Darren, but he seemed to pay it no mind. Actually, its added weight was stabilizing him a little better.
The floor, finally, had peaked in its crescendo of quaking, and began to slowly dwindle in severity. The quake in San Francisco had finished with a sputter and just died, as if in mid-sentence. This one, however, kept rumbling, fading gradually back to normal. The problem of the noise, however, persisted. Now that the ground was quieting, it was only giving the microphone over to whatever had caused it. It was still a rumble, but a distant one. It carried more treble, and was more tinny and grating. As my vision started to normalize, I focused in on Darren, who had collapsed onto the seat of his flighty anchor, with a blanket of corkboard pinning him to it. He was vomiting onto the seat, something brown and green and awful, and I couldn't make out the sound of it at all.
"Are you okay?" I shouted at him, using the full force of my voice. My words sounded like little muffled chirps inside my own head, and Darren didn't respond to them. A hard, hot stone of nausea settled into my belly as well, but I swallowed it down, and began the 6-foot journey to his side. My muscles were so jarred, joints so stiff, bones so achey. It felt as if blood were pouring out of my ears. I touched one and was horrified to feel wetness there. But then the sensation of coolness trickled into my brain (which was still ten minutes behind and trying to sprint back to the present). My shirt was clinging to me and something salty rolled into my eyes. The sprinklers, was all my mind could eke out. And while it was partially right, it wasn't giving me the whole story: the pipes for the sprinkler system overhead had broke open, and water was gushing, unchecked, into the desk space connecting Darren's and my cubicles together. Our computers would have been quite the electrocution hazard, were it not for the fact that the power had gone out in the turmoil.
After a painful century's crawl, I reached my coworker. His scraggly dark hair was clinging to his face, and his stomach was hanging nude out of his shirt, covering his belt. He wasn't precisely fat, not what I would call fat--more doughy, rather, akin to the later days of Orson Welles. He had finished saying farewell to his lunch, but was still immersing his cheek in it. I grabbed his shoulder in a frantic way, and pulled myself to my knees. The earth hadn't finished its bellow, and the sick on the chair was jiggling like pudding. The walls dipped and swayed. The pain in my head chose now to put on its evening wear and strut in stiletto heels all over my frontal lobe. I grabbed at Darren's slumped shoulders, but they wouldn't move. Either that, or all my strength was gone. So I focused my effort on the ceiling panel draped over him, and with a mighty shove, I knocked it back under his desk behind him. He roused at this point and raised his head to look at me, bewildered, slop running down his cheek.
"Are you okay?" He said to me--mouthed, rather, since the outside noise was still too greedy to afford us any decibels.
I was confused. I had come to his rescue, why would he ask me if I were alright?
A swell of nausea bubbled up in my throat and its gravity sucked me back into a crawling position. The earth's rancor was only just a vibration now, but my vision seemed to still be playing jump-rope. My eyes started to become heavy; I was incredibly sleepy. The unpleasantness of the wet clothes, the overbearing rumbling boom, and being in a cold, dirty puddle began to lose its repulsiveness. All I wanted to do was vomit and sleep.
"Oh god, I think it's …" I mouthed to Darren, and trailed off. I had momentarily forgotten the word I was looking for.
He took himself off the chair, and latched onto one of my shoulders. He was staring at me with some mix of horror, worry, and exhaustion.
My averted eyes caught sight of a puddle beneath me. It was wriggling about in the tremor, sending scatters of reflections, and it was pink in color. Something red was rolling off of me--but I didn't have time to process that, or care.
A great WHOOSH! walloped the roof of the single-story building of Pepperdin Staffing, Inc. Even through the crashing rumble outside, was it audible. So, too, were the faint, sharp tinklings of the remaining windows breaking. The daylight, which had severely dimmed already, was choked out entirely, and all that was visible were the faint, red emergency-backup lights directly overhead. A heavy white cloud blossomed in from outside, descending upon us. As it fell, a flurried blanket of silky dust and debris coated everything within eyeshot. The agitated puddle beneath me turned into potato bisque.
But it ceased to matter. I simply laid down and drifted into a deep sleep.