Last Cup of Tea

Kathy awoke around 6:30 AM, eager to get up and start her first day on a new job. It was a normal day, like any other day, but because she was starting a new job in a new town, she was just a little nervous. As she jumped out of her bed, she heard her cat Max meowing loudly and wanting to be let in. To help Max explore his new neighborhood, she had the apartment manager install a cat door in her kitchen. No doubt Max was out all-night skulking about and meeting all the neighbor's cats.

Kathy let Max in after he practically had a cow meowing at the kitchen door to be let in. And still sleepy with blurry eyes that were half closed, she weaved around her dining room table to her kitchen counter and filled up her teapot with water, took out the filter, and filled it with the fresh tea she had bought the night before grocery shopping. She placed the teapot on the stove burner and hummed a tune while the water heated up. As soon as the tea was done, she poured a cup, added a little sweetener and cream and then took it into the bathroom.

She sipped the hot tea, letting it soothe her nerves, then she took off her robe, hung it on the door and started the shower. She tested the water--Kathy liked her showers hot and steamy--and then jumped in for 15-minute shower to further calm her nerves. As she scrubbed her body, washing her face and the sleepy out of her eyes, she hummed the same tune she had hummed when she was making hot tea. She doesn't remember where she heard the tune, maybe in the background on the PA system as she grocery shopped, but she liked it.

The tub she stood in as she showered rumbled a little and she felt the odd vibration in the bottom of her feet. She had not felt this vibration before, but she knew her new apartment was only 100 yards or so from the freeway and maybe the morning traffic speeding by her house made her tub vibrate a little. Shaking her head, she toweled off, slicking her hair back and thinking about the dryer and the curling iron, not really having any inkling at all that she looked sexier with her hair slicked back.

Her hot tea sat on the edge of her pedestal sink and before continuing with her morning beauty treatment, she took a big sip. She turned on the pedestal sink faucet, set the water stop in place, and looking into the mirror, did not notice the small vibration rippling across the small pool of water that had formed. She dried and combed her hair, put on lipstick and eye liner, then walked back into the kitchen to freshen her tea.

For whatever reason, although Kathy was famished this morning--probably nerves she thought--she decided to have a smaller breakfast then she normally had. Kathy was watching her waistline to fit into her new clothes, and so breakfast would just be one hardboiled egg, some orange juice and no bacon.

While she was boiling her egg, Kathy heard a distant rumbling and looking out the window at the bright sun shining through she again shrugged off the rumbling as the sound of heavy traffic on the freeway nearby. She hoped that the rumbling she was hearing was not going to happen every day she lived in this new ground floor apartment and especially not on her quiet weekends. She took her newly poured cup of hot tea over to her dining table and placed her plate down with the tea next to it. Again, her room vibrated, a little more intensely this time, and she was fascinated to watch her teacup vibrate off the edge of the table and smash on the floor below. Picking up the pieces and admitting to herself that maybe she was clumsy, and she had knocked the teacup off the table herself, she went back into the bathroom to brush her teeth and get dressed for work and her new job. She was excited to start a new job in a new city. Although she was still nervous and a little bit anxious, she thought those feelings would go away after a while.

In the bathroom and standing before the pedestal sink, Kathy looked into the mirror as she brushed her teeth, looking down at the pool of water in the sink, was amazed to see the water rippling. How could the traffic on the freeway vibrate her apartment, she thought. She looked up again at herself in the mirror and realized that the glass mirror was rippling, as well. Then, the mirror shattered into millions of tiny, jagged knives in front of her, forcing her to step back.

Like the now shattered mirror, the bathroom itself began to ripple, literally lifting her up and down on the tile floor like she was in one of those funny-moving walkways in the Carnival Funhouse. And then the floor lifted up very high and threw her across the room into the tub. Laying dazed and disoriented after her head hit the back wall of the tub, she realized that the whole house was rippling...the walls, the floors, the doors, and with a loud, scared meow, her cat Max ran in the bathroom and jumped into the tub with her. She lay in the tub, with Max cradled in her arms, looking out the bathroom door at her kitchen floor undulating up and down, her kitchen cabinets crashing to the floor, and her refrigerator flipping over and spilling out all the new groceries she had bought the night before. Losing her groceries was the least of her worries. The worst was yet to come.

Yes, it was Kathy's first day on a new job, but for her and the billions of humans living on the Earth, it was their last day on Earth.

Those ripples in Kathy's bathroom and kitchen swept across her yard, her neighborhood, the nearby freeway, her town, her state, her country, and her continent, across the oceans, around the world and in one last silent pause the Earth exploded.

Kathy wasn't nervous about her job after that.