I
The world had shattered into fragments and ribbons.
She had been sitting in her apartment, her hands folded in her lap, her thoughts ticking too loudly in the cavern of her mind. Then a hissing sound had whipped up a great distance away and all the thoughts were pinned up. Her eyes shot to the window and light consumed everything.
It was a brilliant stark yellow that simmered to a dead white.
And then the world broke. Or so it felt like to everyone with their feet on the ground. The vibrations rolled violent and sharp through the earth and the light pulsed. The surface world was meeting with the sky, and nothing was in any specific direction.
When the first wave of this horrible earthly shudder passed, she found herself on some flat surface. Her breath was coming in little spastic bursts. She had fallen off the couch and now her apartment seemed a shivering little box. The air hummed, reverberating and ringing in her ears. She slid her elbows underneath her and reached for something - anything. Her fingernails scratched lines in the wood.
The first whole thought finally unpinned itself in the following seconds:
Where is he?
This question settled in her mind as she crawled along the floor. The coat rack had fallen over and she stretched for it, pulling his coat from it, her hands clawed and frantic. She draped it over herself and sank into its fabric, knowing it was cold outside, this fragment of sensibility peeling off somehow in the jumbled mess her mind had become.
There was a pop sound, from somewhere up high, and the ground dropped out from underneath her. Her chin smacked the floor boards. Her shaking arms pulled her body up and blood dribbled from her lip.
Where is he?
This thought blossomed. One other unfolded: What the hell is going on? But then it drifted off and more layers of the original raveled off, and her panic suddenly became a blessing. This collapse of the world around her, or whatever it was, immediately became a wondrous opportunity.
For escape.
Breaking away. The walls were breaking, the floorboards snapped. And now she could break away. This was her chance, this sudden collapse of the town around her, it was signaling her time to flee the living horror she had trapped herself in.
Because he wasn’t there.
She was alone in her trembling apartment, and she could run and maybe the disaster - that white, white light - would hide where she had gone. And he would never find her. Never.
Another shudder took the earth. A thing that was hardly a scream choked out of her and she scrambled across the floor toward where she believed the door was. Panic was making her chest sting, her heart beating much too fast; adrenaline was singing through her blood vessels. If there was ever a time she was capable of this, it was now.
Pulling the coat tight around her, she flipped her hand down the door knob; the door clicked open and bitter cold air filled her lungs. She coughed, hacked, wiped blood from her chin. She slid down the first two steps before she rose to her feet, like a toddler would. She felt top heavy, like her legs were matchsticks or straws. She realized she had forgotten her shoes but she was already almost to the street then and there was a light in the sky that was sending colors across her vision.
Her toes stung in the powdery snow but her house didn’t seem to exist anymore behind her. Or she was not allowing it to exist.
The suburbia was a storm now. The perfect rows of houses had been set off kilter, and all of the tiny quaint families were out in the streets just as she was, staring up at that orange, yellow, white pulsing sky. They clung to each other, to the ground, as the earth shivered and quaked, an epileptic fit.
And she pushed past them. She wasn’t quite sure where she was going - where there was to go - but her feet were suddenly taken then with that burning, lovely desire to flee.
The suburbia ate her up and images flashed by, things her mind didn’t register. She reached a point when she no longer recognized her surroundings but she kept diving forward, pushing through these unknown sights and running toward…
Where am I going?
She stumbled briefly; snowflakes caught in her hair and there were a few people screaming in the doorway of a corner store at the end of the road.
Away.
Life is supposed to be systematic to a point. Some things just do not happen to you. This doesn’t happen to you. The world doesn’t just begin to shake and fall apart as one sits on the couch and ponders over their life situation. But it was happening, and what was she doing?
She began to run again.
She had reverted to simple instinct; why was her first instinct to run?
The desire to run had been sitting dormant in her for two years now. She hadn’t realized what energy this desire had to it though, because her legs were pumping underneath her, numb yet carrying her along.
If he found her now…
The city popped and rolled and the lights flashed and dimmed around her.
