On Saturday morning, while sitting (slightly hunched) at her desk, Sharon suddenly became powerfully and immediately aware that the floor was lava.
It was a good thing she was slouched over with her feet propped up on the corner of her desk, or it could have been very ugly indeed. As it was she just had enough time to smell the hairs on her dangling left arm burning before she had to yank it away from a surface that was now considerably hotter than even the stuffiest days of summer had ever rendered it.
“Fuck,” she swore. This would have been much easier if she’d been in her bedroom, or the kitchen. Now she was surrounded by molten magma with nothing but a chair and a desk separating her from it. Wonderful. Just wonderful.
The chair had wheels.
It took Sharon five minutes of very patient pushing and prodding at the walls to get her into a position adjacent to the kitchen, whereupon her chair finally hit a ruck in the carpet and tipped over, forcing her to make a dive for safety atop the stove, which turned on. After she’d extinguished the fire she used the fridge as a recon point to cautiously hop into the hallway and cling to the bookcase for dear life. The laminated plywood creaked under her hands and the top shelf spilled its guts; an entire five years of National Geographic showered past her head and bobbed cheerily on top of molten rock; untouched by the sulphurous heat.
Sharon’s obsessive-compulsive disorder tingled at her, unsatisfied and unfulfilled. So she said “fuck,” instead, scrabbled over to the far side of the bookcase, and launched herself face-first into her bedroom, where she hit the bed with her face, rolled over six times, and wrapped herself up in her blankets.
Far, far away she heard the faint sound of her cat bitching at her as he stood crabby-faced and entirely untouched in the midst of searing temperatures.
“No,” she told him. And then she went to bed at ten-thirty AM.
***
On Sunday morning Sharon awoke with the cat’s anus four inches away from her face, as usual.
She fed him. It shut him up. She drank coffee. It shut the voices in her head up.
Ah, normal.
Almost normal.
She frowned as wakefulness crept in from the periphery of her brain to colonize the cerebellum’s highlands. Something was wrong. Something wasn’t usual. Something was different.
No, the floor wasn’t lava anymore. Good thing too, since she hadn’t checked until just now.
No, the air wasn’t lava either.
No, she’d just fed the cat.
Oh right, she was out of milk.
The people on the street knew something was wrong too. Their eyes hunted Sharon, twitchy and nervous, fingers grasping at their coats and legs twitching to propel them that crucial extra ten inches away from her on the sidewalk. She felt as if she’d been sprayed by a skunk, and checked her deodorant carefully.
Nope, still there.
Milk, more cereal, a bag of chips to kill herself slightly faster. The cashier stood ramrod-stiff on her side of the counter, eyes wary.
“Put it down,” she told Sharon, voice trying to find a place somewhere between wary and war-y.
“Is a twenty too big to break now?”
“Put it down on the counter and step back.”
Sharon held out the bill and she shrank backwards.
Wait. The crawling, icy feeling churning in her bones made sense. Everything made sense.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m It.”
The cashier said nothing, not even as Sharon leaned over very, very, very carefully and poked her arm with one finger.
“No tag-bags,” she said reflexively, and was rewarded with a surge of genuine hatred in the eyes of her customer service representative. Shaken, she returned home and spent the day asleep in the rubble of a bag of chips.
***
On Monday morning Sharon thought it was Sunday still or possibly Saturday and got up at eleven-thirty, had two cups of coffee, ignored the cat and fed him in that order, stared blankly into space, remembered that she probably should’ve made sure the floor wasn’t lava at some point, then also remembered it was her shift today.
“Oh,” she said.
Five minutes later, running down the road, she amended herself: “fuck.”
The bus wasn’t coming. Half an hour late, no notice given, no bus. Which would’ve been easy to see coming too, because there were no cars. No bikes. No pedestrians. No traffic at all.
No ANYBODY at all.
So Sharon walked ten miles to work and arrived halfway through her shift, composing her resignation speech in her head. She was trying to think of a good word to attach to “spittle” when she realized work was also empty. The coffee machine was spotlessly unattended. The barstools were cold and unwarmed by asses of any magnitude or insignificance. The caffeinated had been left to go latte themselves.
She signed in at seven AM because who the hell would know, got changed, and slouched at the counter for two hours before she started screaming obscenities nonstop at the top of her lungs.
Ten minutes into THAT she stopped for breath, breathed, then heard someone else keep breathing when she was through.
Five minutes after that she found where the sound was coming from; the balled-up, cramped, eyes-bugged, hands-clasped-over-mouth form of her manager, who’d somehow managed to cram herself into the scone cupboard.
It took her another two hours to find everyone else’s hiding spots for her shift – the broom cupboard; the out-of-service toilet; tucked into three separate parkas and wedged into the back of the freezer with an oxygen tank; hiding atop the shop’s marquee behind the logo; and at home under the bed – and by the time she was through her hours were up and frankly she would’ve preferred having to deal with customers.
She went home, thought about her pay, kicked off her shoes, and went to bed.
Her cat bitched at her until he got within arm’s reach, where she cuddled him until he gave up.
***
On Tuesday morning Sharon slept in.
***
On Wednesday morning Sharon stayed at home.
***
On Thursday morning she turned off her phone.
***
On Friday morning Sharon ignored the knocking until the door fell in.
“C’mon,” the world told her. “C’mooooon.”
She pulled the blankets over her head.
“C’moooooooooooon,” they said, tugging at the sheets. “You PROMISED. Today is I Spy. You’ve gotta play it.”
“No.”
“You’ve GOTTA.”
“No.”
“C’mooooooooooooooon come plaaaaaay with usssssssssss,” the world said. “C’mooooon. Don’t be a party-pooper. C’mooooon.”
“Fine,” said Sharon. “I Spy something new.”
“Is it the ceiling?”
“No.”
“Is it the floor?”
“No.”
“Is it the walls?”
“No.”
“Is it the cat?”
“No.”
“Is it the bed?”
“No.”
“Is it you?”
Sharon didn’t say anything.
“Is it you?”
Sharon didn’t say anything.
“You have to say if we got it right!”
Sharon didn’t say anything and the world pulled the sheets off the bed to find nothing there at all except a still-warm pillow, cooling rapidly in the breeze from the open window.
“Oh BEANS,” they said.
At that moment the cat, wounded by their ignoring his bitching, clawed their leg open.
***
Sharon was already halfway out of town by then, but the scream was plenty loud enough that there was no mistaking it.
Still, she had a good head start. And some motivation to make due on it.