🎉🥂🛰
I had just been promoted for a new role, into one that I could finally see myself occupying. Someone brought a cake and a fancy bottle. Upon receiving these gifts I had to smile and nod as if I knew the particular brand of bubbly because that was expected of me.
There were many people there, all smiling slightly uncomfortably. I probably hadn’t seen so many people pretend to care about me since the fifth grade. It was deranging to say the least.
Someone patted me on the back and handed me a glass of the bubbly. I sifted through the people all piled into my flat. Many found it surprising that my accommodation was well-fitted considering my previous employment history. I have been lucky to be blessed with reasonably wealthy parents, but I had in no way I intended to leech off them forever. This new job would give me the opportunity to maintain my previous lifestyle.
The guests politely addressed one another, trying their best. Everyone wanted to have a good time, but no one really knew where to start. We were currently living through the interval of the party that the “cool” people would miss. It is always much better to arrive after the ball is already rolling so to speak.
Some pretzel sticks, cheese and other snacks were being served. By “being served” I mean in the sense of being laid out on a broad, white porcelain plate on a low glass table.
There were a couple of girls sitting on the triangular sofa framing the view of the setting sun behind them. These young women were wearing summer strap dresses with the growing chill of autumn noted in their attire by their choice of chunky boots as footwear. I had never seen these girls before, but knew them instantly to be some of the many girlfriends of a couple of my highschool buddies. These ambitious entertainers had gone on to study business and finance respectively, allowing them to be employed by companies reputable enough to earn adequate sums of money and adequately beautiful women. I felt slightly bad for the girls because they had probably expected something fancier – maybe an evening of drinks at the Empire State building, or a private dinner at a high end sushi restaurant.
There were some quirkier individuals among the partygoers too. There was one peculiar man wearing a green ensemble with a beret. From under his green suit jacket poked out an orange silk shirt adorned with a yellow ball print. He stuck to the bookshelf like glue, displaying my art books to other party goers as if they were his own. I caught him pouring over a page of Yves Klein blue as I walked by.
“Hello Charles!” he said as he saw me. His ink-black mustache quivered slightly as he waited for my reply.
“Uh hi,” I replied. Without stopping to continue the conversation, I regretfully reconsidered my choice of outsourcing the guestlist to my girlfriend. Jessica always knew the right way to go about things to make other people happy.
There Jessica was in the corner, perfectly fulfilling her role as hostess. She was speaking animatedly to a particular Josephine, who was a coworker from my previous employment. Despite not really caring about these sorts of things I remembered that Josephine had recently been through a divorce or something similar, so I guessed the conversation to concern matters that would go beyond my comprehension.
Not really knowing what to do with myself, I headed for the safety of the kitchen. As I considered the possibility of putting out some more snacks or taking out a new bottle to refill the empty glasses, I realized that I hadn’t seen many people in a setting like this for a long time. Having a live-in girlfriend fulfilled most of my need for daily human interaction. Most of my past need for socialization had probably arisen from loneliness disguised as something else.
Suddenly I noticed that there was a lady with hair the same color as Jessica’s sitting quietly at the dining room table. She wore a floaty red shirt tied at the front and gazed intently out onto the multilayered rectangular concrete slabs. I stopped abruptly in my tracks as I didn’t recognise her or have the least bit of idea where Jessica could have known her from. An ethereal energy encased the mysterious woman. I felt the beams radiating from her bounce off my skin and scuttle along inside of the windows of my flat.
Surprisingly she began to address me. “It’s beginning,” she said.“Just look at those cracks in the pavement down the road.”
I was so taken off guard that I instinctively took her advice. I approached the see-through window carefully as if the glass had been completely absent and I was in danger of teetering off the tall building. Sure enough, in the far distance I could see the cracks in the ground that she had mentioned. The abrasions appeared to have been caused by impact, but were not of a distinctive enough shape to make sense of what had caused them to come into being.
The kitchen began to shake. I have been to an earthquake simulator at a museum before, and to tell you the truth the shaking felt at first mostly similar to that. The gentle shake soon morphed into something different and began to feel as if I had taken a seat in a dishwasher. Now the room was not just trebleming, but really rumbling and reverberating.
Down on the pavement, a tsunami of molten red and yellow pushed itself skywards. The eruption had several stages of tiny outbursts, characterizing it more as a living organism than as a force of nature. Slivering and bulging, the columns of different colored lava bubbled and boasted, becoming larger and larger with every breath I took. The floor that had once been the epitome of stability betrayed me and adopted a new position slanting towards the East River. The floor took on such a dramatic sloping position that it was impossible to keep balance standing squarely on two feet. We were being pulled towards the epicenter. Despite the panic all around me, I was able to grab onto the crux between the floor and the wall. With the ledge between the living room and kitchen beneath my feet, I could rest quite comfortably compared to the rest of my guests, some of whom were already pushed to the extremes of the room at the inside border of the glass wall.
While trying my very best to keep my position, I noticed that the unknown woman remained silently seated. It was almost as if there was a special gravitational pull around her that refused to be interrupted. Stranger than her unmoving surroundings however, was the fact that she remained completely calm. Her eyes were sealed shut but her lips were moving almost imperceptibly, betraying her secret chanting.
From the other side of the window a small flying object that could only be described as a pod became apparent. It must have swooped in during all the mayhem because this was my first time noticing it. It hovered statically like an enormous insect at the left of my field of vision. I expected it to fly away, but it continued to hover, waiting for something or someone.
Sure enough, the waiting was soon to be over. With her eyes still shut and the red floaty blouse fluttering ever so slightly, the unknown woman rose from the kitchen table and advanced towards the pod. She was in a trancelike state. If I had seen her like this in different circumstances, I might’ve thought her to be sleepwalking. Once she reached the border of the room, the huge glass window slid open for her. Without looking down, the woman stepped over the ledge and climbed gracefully into the open pod. After that she melted in, and would probably never have been seen again unless I saw my chance.
“HEY, what’s this all about?!” I yelled in the direction of the open window and the pod.
With the utter precision and stealth that could only have been mechanical in nature, the pod opened in my direction. The woman was lifted out of the pod through the open hole on the top.
“Get in Charles,” she said. She was not yelling so it was hard to hear her, and I could only know for certain what she was saying based on the movement of her lips.
I was afraid to let go. Thankfully, I didn’t have to commit to the risk. The pod shifted sideways and floated into the room to retrieve me. I waited for it to give some signal of encouragement. Just as smoothly as she had ascended into the pod, the woman soon ascended out of it.
🎉🥂🛰
Once in the pod I was startled by the luxury of everything. The interior was sleek and expensive. My surroundings were similar to what I would have expected to find in the backseat of some large limousine. Everybody in the pod appeared to be an important person. One of the people in the pod who looked familiar to the current American president gave me an explanation: “Charles, you must understand! We knew what the world was heading towards and we decided to give ourselves a fresh start.”
“But what about everybody else?” I asked.
“Consider yourself lucky! You were at the right place at the right time,” said the president with a smile.
🎉🥂🛰
It was at the border between the atmosphere and space that we began to encounter problems. The pod that had been speeding away from earth at a million miles per hour made a jolting stop. First we were suspended in thin air. Then we heard a high pitched squealing noise. Within 30 seconds this noise also came to an abrupt end. There was a banging on the door of the pod. The man in charge of operating the self-driving pod pressed the button that led the door of the pod to slide open. Into the pod streamed a squad of guards. These big green humanoids with huge muscles were wearing outfits suitable for a swat team.
They rallied us all into the middle of the pod, which was not difficult considering the small size of the space. Most people seemed smart enough to understand the gravity of the situation. It was clear that we would have no way out if they didn’t let us through. Unfortunately, a man with slicked back hair and an immaculate suit who had previously been tapping away uninterruptedly on his phone was the first to open his mouth.
“Don’t you see, we’re all very important people here. Let’s just get on with this so we can get back to business,” he said.
“Very important people you say? We don’t need any more important people around here,” grunted one of the guards. He then motioned to some of the other guards. The three guards who had been called to action each picked up one individual from the pile of people sitting in the conglomerate at the middle of the pod.
The humans remaining at the center looked around at one another in disbelief. One of the women shrieked and someone else started crying silently.
I was seated towards the outside of the patch of people. As the fourth guard approached, it was obvious that I was next in line. Right before the bulking arms had the chance to pick me up off the floor, my brain helped me to come up with one of my most well placed phrases of all time:
“I’m not an important person,” I said.
“Good! We need a new translator. Take the rest of them and leave this one here with us,” said the guard.
🎉🥂🛰
WAST WRTNG 