It Starts With an Earthquake

Lenny was contently reading the morning paper, savoring every sip of his steaming cup of black coffee, when all of a sudden the house began to jangle and pop.  As the rumbles subsided, he got up from the kitchen table, folded the newspaper and silenced the radio.  Peering outside, he thought to himself,

“Great, my day starts with an earthquake.”

As he studied the view from his kitchen window, he saw a mesmerizing murmuration of starlings dominating the sky. As he gazed at the dazzling cloud of birds swirling, pulsating, and drawing together to the thinnest of waists, his attention was diverted to a pit of snakes unearthing themselves from their den. Puzzled, his eyes then shot up towards the sound of aeroplanes rumbling across the sky. Such an odd way to start the morning, birds and snakes and aeroplanes, but Lenny was not afraid.

As much as he would have liked to continue to stare out the window, Lenny had to get to work. The radio offered no relief to the oddities at play that started his day. First, he heard an NPR news report on how the eye of a hurricane mysteriously seemed to come to a standstill on Daytona Beach, Florida. Then, as he was stopped at a traffic light, Lenny saw a petulant vagrant brazenly hoisting a sign and shouting, “World serves it’s own needs, dummy serve your own needs!”

Lenny grunted, “No.”

As Lenny finally got downtown, he saw a building ablaze and a local fire department ladder in the midst of a fearful fight down at the Height building. A frayed wire started the firestorm and the whole block looked like a combat site. He slowed down to check out the scene, but a stream of cars behind him blasted their horns as they were coming in a hurry, breathing down his neck.

At the next block, he saw team by teams of reporters looking baffled, trumped, tethered, and cropped.

“Look at that," he said to himself, "How can they be low playing that fire at the Height building?” 

He then saw the soup kitchen overflowing with people, "Fine, then, population common food. It’ll do.” Lenny chuckled.

A businessman on the corner dashed out and pounded the hood of Lenny’s car, yelling, “Save yourself, serve yourself, world serves it's own needs!”

Lenny refused to listen, “Bleeding heart dummy. What does he think this is the rapture? That’s only for the revered and the right, right?”

With a sense of vitriolic fervor, Lenny pulled in to his parking spot at work feeling pretty psyched.

Six o’clock couldn’t come soon enough after an uneventful work day tucked away in his cubicle. It was time for Lenny’s favorite TV hour, and he just missed getting caught in the traffic jam at the foreign towers. But instead of a new episode of “Slash and Burn: Return”, the network continued its coverage of the day’s events; Lenny could literally listen to himself churn. The networks were stationed at several major metropolitan cities; as the military was uniformly locking in. In the streets, there was book burning, blood-letting, every motive escalating, automobiles incinerating. The news reporters were telling the viewers to light a candle, light a votive, step down to the lowest level of your home.

Just then, Lenny’s roommate Lester bangs through the front door, shouting, “If you go outside, watch your heal, there is crushed glass everywhere! There was also a swath of no fear, cavalier renegades; so steer clear!”

Lenny replied, “I know! Have you watched the news today? It’s like a tournament of lies. They want to offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline.”

As the two sat down for dinner, Lester proceeded to tell Lenny about how the other night he dreamt of knives and continental drift divide. All the mountains sat in a line, and how Leonard Bernstein was there. All of which was extremely peculiar, to say the least.

Lester continued, “The weirdest thing about it was that it was my birthday party and we were having cheesecake and ..... jellybeans. Boom! I hate jellybeans.”

Lenny chimed in, “That dream is kind of symbiotic of all the events that have happened today, right?”

“Right!” Lester agreed, “It’s almost like it’s the end of the world as we know it.”

As he loaded the dishes into the dishwasher, Lenny expanded on that thought, “If it’s the end of the world as we know it, I feel fine. It's time I had some time alone.”