Ever Present, No Matter What We Do

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. Mrs. Henderson was frustrated, because, you see, she couldn't do a damn thing about it. 1

All her life, she’d spent in luxury. From caviar to limos, from bubble baths in diamond encrusted jacuzzis to summer houses in Los Angelos and Paris. She’d been given everything. Why, once, her father drove her through hopeless ghettos with bums climbing over each other for a soggy piece of food in the gutters. He told her rudely, “Gretchen, this is what you don’t want to be. This is what you need to detach yourself from. When I caught you sneaking over here the other day, I cried. Can you trust these streets? Look at them. If you ever end up here, ever, you can say goodbye to your parents. I’m supposed to support you no matter what, but this…this is something you get punished for.” He swiftly spanked her when she got home. The memory was still fresh in her mind. She had no lust for riches. She didn’t mind drinking a flat Cola rather than an effervescent bottle of champagne, she didn’t mind taking a urine drenched subway for the experience rather than always drive around in a spotless tinted limo. She’d just been afraid of her parents abandonment. Maybe, once she’d wanted all of that, and maybe she still did. But, what stayed in her mind was her fear of dissaproval. She’d been raised that way. She’d been told by her cold parents that there was no problem that wealth could not fix. 2

So, she had tried to pay off the government 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 whether it be on Mars or in the Amazon. 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. She didn’t matter anymore. 3

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. She heard a soft crack that grew into cacophony. A large tremor opened from her ceiling, and her grand piano upstairs crashed onto her stereo. Silence ached her ears more than the music. Silence’s standards had been updated by that annoying rumble heard around the world. 4

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. It seemed darkly funny to her. 5

The way she’d been taught to treat worldly possessions was to have them polished, and on a pedastal. Maybe, that was the way she’d treated them.
When her friends came over, she would argue that her daughter was the best. That was a form of putting her on a pedastal. But, on the other hand, that may not have been the way to treat her. Her pedastaling and glorifying was only compensation for her daughter’s faults. She had pretended that her daughter wasn’t a lesbian for years. She had pretended that her daughter wasn’t living in one of those ghettos in New York that Mrs. Henderson, herself had been chastised for visiting. 6

Mrs. Henderson stood up and aimlessly walked over to an untouched vase in the corner. From far away it seemed, elegant and unique. However, when you came closer, it was chipped and slightly yellow. She picked it up, and smiled at it. Even though it had been made in Japan as it clearly stated on the side, she’d hid it for years from her overbearing racist father. She realized what she should have done now is had it on the dining room table, holding some lilies from her garden. In fact, she almost walked over to the dining room when she remembered the apocalypse. And, then she realized she had nothing. 7

As everything she had maintained on the second floor, canyoned into the living room, a little voice in her head sounded. Some primal instinct puppeted her toward the hall through tendrils of electronics in her office hanging above her. She walked slowly over to the cellar door past her original Claude Monet art. 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. She was finally somewhat safe in the cement pantry. The world was falling apart, and she trusted a pantry. She laughed. 8

Unconsciousness (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. As she staggered up the cement stairs, she noticed 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. She thought aloud, “But, how long was eternity without anything?” 9

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. A life, she didn’t even have that. She didn’t have a damn thing, but that rumbling sound. 10

After, what seemed like hours of crying, she stopped. Again, as if pulled by some force, 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. It had been worth millions. None of that meant anything to Mrs. Henderson now. 11

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 shattered presents for her. She knew that behind that dust in the sky, there was only endless black space. And, all the beautiful elegant stars that were managed by that space would’nt stop it from being dark. 12

A bang sounded from the shotgun. The rumbling ended when she died. At least, nothing with ears was there to hear it if it did continue. 13

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