Ever Present, No Matter What

The chandeliers crashed down on the spotless marble floor of centuries old. Mrs. Henderson sat on the coiled staircase, abandoned. Her corpulent body stuffed into her favorite dress, not that it mattered anyway. The end was immense. She knew that the fatal shaking near her home was only a fraction of what was going on around the world. It would obliterate all life forms (well, mostly). Mrs. Henderson was frustrated, because, you see, she couldn't do a damn thing about it. 1

She had tried to pay the government off with greenbacks, diamonds, and properties. "No," they declined, "It won't be worth a thing next Thursday." She wanted to spend the last twenty - maybe thirty - years of her life, well, alive. She had somberly pleaded them for the last time yesterday, again declined. In frustration she had destroyed her great grandmother's antique telephone (one time Teddy Roosevelt himself used it). Blood lines, infamous ancestors, and rich items didn't matter anymore. 2

Compensating for demise, classical music stung even the deaf's ears as she watched her priceless vases crumble. Priceless, that's how everything was these days. Her grand piano upstairs crashed onto her sterero. Silence ached her ears more than the music. No, not silence, quiet moments had already been destroyed by that annoying rumble heard around the world. 3

The cold reality had dawned on her yesterday after she threw a tantrum on the phone to NASA. She realized that her only possessions were long gone. Her husband (cancer), her daughter (car accident), and her parents (long ago). And, she'd never realized she'd possessed them (if she had, she would have had them polished, and on a pedastal). She had nothing. 4

As everything she had maintained on the second floor, canyoned into the living room, a little voice in her head sounded. Some primal instinct marionetted her to arise. She walked slowly over to the cellar door. What was the point? She would die anyway. Ceiling knocked her to the ground, but she stood up and kept shuffling. She slammed the cellar door, slowly marched down the stairs, and walked to the pantry in the corner. It was her only chance (ha, she thought). She wiped the blood off of her sweaty forehead finally somewhat safe in the cement pantry. The world was falling apart, and she trusted a pantry. She laughed darkly. 5

Sleep (what she hoped would be death) consumed her. She woke up to, what all people wake up to in these stories, a post-apocalyptic world. Her crushed house lay in rubble around the miracuously untouched pantry. The sky was blanketed by a quilt of dust, trees in the distance burnt to ashes along with the birds in them, a baby's fading cries somewhere near her, and an eternally rumbling ground.6

Mrs. Henderson screamed. She threw a shard of vase at the sky, trying to taunt God or the spaceship from NASA with innocent scientists aboard. Her head burned with far worse pain than ever before. She collapsed on the ground. With no joyful noises touching her ears at all, she covered them. 7

After, what seemed like hours, of crying, she stopped. As if being marionetted, she sauntered over to a familiar cold barrel. The very same cold barrel that had shot off the bullets that had killed the confederates in the Civil War. None of that meant anything to Mrs. Henderson. 8

She lifted her great great great grandfather's pistol. She shakingly pressed it to her temple - almost impossibly. She kneeled in her bloody dinner gown around all of her husband's presents for her. She knew that behind that dust in the sky, there was only night. And, all the stars in the world wouldn't stop it from being dark.9

A bang sounded from the shotgun. The last sound before silence (that low rumbling and crackling of fire were, now, the standard).10