And It All Comes Tumbling Down

When I wake, my world is filled with smoke.

My eyes are filled with water and there is a ringing in my ears that fills my head, and I wonder if my brain has melted.

It is so hot.

And I realize that my room is filled with fire.

I can barely feel my mother’s hands on my shoulders shaking me; shaking me awake; shaking me to make sure that I’m alive. 

Her mouth is blurry through my tears, but I can see that it is open.

Open wide.

She is screaming.

She is screaming at me that we have to go.

We have to leave now.

There is a rumble beneath the ground, and it shakes the house and my mother stumbles into my dresser and the drawers fly open and clothes tumble to the ground.

I watch the clothes fall and they seem to float, as if they are being suspended, as if they are snowflakes, as if they are falling in slow motion.

And I realize that they are falling in slow motion.

Everything is in slow motion because the world has exploded and for a moment in time, for a brief moment, everything is frozen.

Everything is on the precipice of never having existed.

And then the rumble stops and time fast forwards as if it’s making up for the moments that it lost.

My mom regains her balance and she is pulling me from my bed.

She’s saying words I can’t hear.

As we move through the house I grab random objects in my path.

The book I haven’t finished.

The wooden bluejay my grandmother gave me when I was five.

A birthday card my dad gave me when I was sixteen. The last one he ever gave me. The last thing he ever gave me before he withered away before our eyes, taken by a cancer that was so sudden. So vicious. So fast in its destruction. So expensive in its aftermath that my mother could never really grieve since her heart was overwhelmed with hospital bills. As I hold the card and the book and the wooden bird close to my chest, I am glad that my father isn’t alive to see this. That he isn’t alive to see how quickly the world came apart. How quickly everything he loved was destroyed by the bombs and the fires and the floods and the riots. How everyone turned against each other so quickly. How we tried to fight and how we failed. How the ones who were supposed to protect us, caved in the name of security, in the name of comfort, in the name of money. How they left the rest of us to rot.

Not to rot.

To run.

To run from the home my parents built, to run in the middle of night, in the middle of the smoke.

I pause and stare at my father’s books on fire. The pages crumpling so quickly. The words melting together on top of each other, over each other, blending into each other. I step toward them, wanting to grab more, wanting to save his most precious things, but my mother pulls me away. Pulls me forward.

No time, she screams into my ear.

No time.

There is no time. We have run out of time. We have run out of options.

We are out the door and the world is full of smoke even on the outside.

There are flames as far as my eyes can see.

There are helicopters and sirens and the bombs are falling and dropping like raindrops. Like a storm. Their explosions fill the world like thunder. Like the sounds of battling gods.

My mother throws me into our car.

I watch as she runs around to the other side.

I am frozen in my seat.

I squeeze the wooden bird and the book and the birthday card so hard that I break the bird’s wing.

I watch it drop to the floor of the car with a thud.

I watch blood fill my hands.

My mother gets inside.

She turns on the car.

And we drive.

We speed down our street.

There are so many cars already. There are so many stacked in piles having already crashed, having already been torn to pieces.

My mother swerves and curves and it is like we are dancing with our car on the road.

She avoids falling concrete and debris and glass and bodies running in every direction.

People throw themselves on our car.

Their mouths open.

Their arms pleading for us to take them along.

But we speed past.

There is cruelty in the apocalypse.

There is cruelty in the survival.

And I look out the window and there is the gray skyscraper with its many windows and its neon sign at the top announcing itself as the World’s Best Bank.

And it is still standing.

Miraculously.

There are broken windows but the structure is there. It has not collapsed. It has not been stricken.

It stands as if the power of what’s inside is enough to keep it alive.

Even as everything else around it falls.

It stands like defiance. Like pride. Like tyranny.

There are papers falling from the windows.

They float like snow.

Like ash.

There are so many bodies clamoring on the streets below.

They have their arms raised, their hands open so wide.

Their faces stretched into expressions of desperation, of need, of desire, of hope.

And I realize that the papers are dollar bills.

Thousands and thousands of dollar bills are dropping from the sky.

And through my window I see a man turn to me.

He smiles as he holds his piles of cash.

As if it will save him.

He raises his arms up and lifts his face toward the sky as if he is offering them to the warring gods above.

Even as the world burns, as buildings collapse, as everything we have ever known ceases to exist,

They still clamor for dollar bills.

It is so clear that these people have never read books about the end of the world.

That what they hold in their hands is utterly useless.

And I turn my face from the window and close my eyes against the world.

And in my own darkness, I take myself back to a time before.

And behind my eyelids I can see another car ride on another day when I was in the backseat with my father driving and my mother swaying in the passenger seat to Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles and I looked outside the window as the world passed us by and watched the sun set over the ocean and counted the seagulls flying across the sky wondering what it must feel like to have wings.