Pop

My creepy neighbor watched me walk from my car to the apartment building. He peeked over his balcony wall, his black hair slicked back like crow feathers.

I scowled hard at him and ran up three stories of stairs without stopping. I unlocked my door as fast as I could and slammed it shut, locked it, stood against it while I caught my breath. Why was he always watching me?

I’d been feeling woozy all day and my stomach hurt so I fell into my couch, closed my eyes and spiraled into a deep, black sleep.



I’m walking into a movie theatre but the movie has already started. I can tell it’s scary by the music’s rhythmic urgency. I’m standing at the side, waiting until my eyes adjust to the dark so I can find an empty seat.

On the screen, a man wearing fingerless black leather gloves and holding a knife is walking with large strides toward his victim who has fallen. The music becomes more erratic as he thrusts the knife into and out of his victim’s flesh over and over and over again.

I see an empty seat etched in the dark. It’s in the middle of a row full of people, so I inch my way past a tangle of legs. I sit on something squishy. The chair is full of lumps that feel like soft toads. I squirm, trying to get comfortable and bump the man’s arm who is in the seat next to mine. “Quiet!” He hisses. He pushes his face inches from mine and gives me the meanest look I would ever see.

In the movie, the man with the black leather gloves tracks down victims grimly in a forest until each one falls at his feet before him. Then he sticks his hooked hunting knife through layers of skin, tearing flesh apart to reveal the organs and guts within, spilling pools of blood on the dirt.

One of the lumps in my seat is moving. It inches its way out from under me and scurries up my arm. “AAAAGGGHHHH,” I jump out of my seat and fling it off. A two inch long roach lands on the man’s head in the seat in front of me. People turn around to see what the commotion is. Their pale faces reveal sad, tired eyes. My stomach cramps up so tight it buckles me over and I fall to the floor.

Crows circle overhead, above the audience, cawing in slow drawn out moans. Their feathers fall to the ground in lazy whispers. I grab a fistful out of my hair.

In the movie, blood is everywhere, flowing freely. It seems to be leaking out through a rip in the screen and dripping onto the theatre floor. Something is terribly wrong. A searing pain rips through my insides.



I screamed and woke myself up. I sat up on my couch trying to decide if I should take myself to the hospital. The pain in my stomach is unbearable.

At that moment the room began to shake. The building shimmied from side to side, with an effortless violence, flinging me onto the floor. Five seconds, that was all, then nothing.

The damage was done. Furniture had tipped over, bookshelves had fallen, windows exploded inward, dishes, books, pictures, everything had been tossed and broken and shattered.

I stumbled across the mess to my bathroom and scooped cold water onto my face, letting it drip freely down my chin as I looked at myself in the mirror.

I seemed unreal. My blue eyes had dulled into a dry gray and were sinking further into their sockets. My skin looked rubbery and loose.

I heard him before I saw him. A slight rustling sound caught my attention and then he rounded the corner and stood in the doorway to my bathroom. It was the creepy man from downstairs.

“What are you doing here?” I yelled.

“I’m trying to get you to wake up.” He said and his eyes seemed empty and tired.

I looked down on the floor between us and saw a growing puddle of blood on the tiles. “What have you done?” But I did not wait around for the answer.

I raced out of my apartment and down the stairs. No matter how fast I ran I felt him with me, exhaling a slow wind, like a whisper, against the back of my neck. I ran across the street and then stopped to catch my breath.

He was already there, ahead of me, waiting. “I just want you to wake up.” He said.



Once outside, I realized that the city had fallen into pandemonium.

People were running down sidewalks and across streets, scattering in all different directions the way bugs scatter under sudden light. Blurred faces zoomed toward me and then away.

Things were not in their proper places. An apartment building down the street had collapsed from the earthquake. Cars were merged into each other as if someone had picked up the land and tipped it sideways.

I grabbed a girl’s arm as she tried to run past me. I saw her face and fell into a curious déjà vu. I knew this girl.

In an instant the past came back and I could see the entire world in a drop of rain.

Carole was my best friend in sixth grade. We were inseparable. We drew monsters with felt tip pens and made up stories about them at my kitchen table.

We swam in the swim team together. At meets everybody knew that if I didn’t win she would. Nobody could even come close. We read British comic books about orphaned girls who lived in evil boarding schools. Her mom cooked us beignets for breakfast at sleepovers and always gave me extra powdered sugar.

I tried to hug Carole but she slipped through me as if I didn’t exist.

She had gone back to England for good with her family the summer between sixth and seventh grade. I spent the rest of summer making up stories by myself. School started in the fall but I remained lost. Drawing wasn’t as fun anymore. Nothing was the same. I dropped out of swim team. I lost my bearings.

She had disappeared into the air like a wandering bubble, and then left again a thousand times more, over and over as time went on. Then again didn’t everybody?




Something far off caught my eye. I turned my gaze to the horizon. Something was happening off in the distance, a good 75 miles away. It was a wall of gray water rising up from behind the mountains. A mass of water, spreading as far as the eye could see, crashed down over the tops of cliffs and pushed through trees, and anything in its way.

The mountains began falling. Brown cascaded into brown like stairs sliding into each other, flattening into a landslide. Clouds of dirt arose and expanded. Wild rivers formed and rushed through the valleys, destroying everything, searching for more. It was only a matter of time now.

I headed to the elementary school nearby where masses of people were gathering in the football field. The man with tired eyes, my neighbor, stayed with me, watching, saying nothing. My stomach pains worsened. It felt as if razor blades were carving initials into the lining of my gut.

The sky and clouds grayed above me. The oncoming waters were at the city limits now. Huge waves reduced the buildings downtown to piles of plaster and dust.

Everybody at the football field was somebody from my past.

Even my dad was there wearing black rimmed glasses. His dark brown hair was combed to one side, the way it had been when he was younger, years before he died.

I ran toward him but he disappeared the same way Carole had.

Even a cat I once had when I was 8 was there. She was trying to climb a tree by the fence. Her body was all black except for white paws and a white triangle on her nose. I remembered her doing backward somersaults to catch feathers on sticks and sleeping on my pillow at night purring loudly into my ear.

I used to open the door and call her home at the same time every day, 8pm. “Tabitha,” I would yell into the night. One night she didn’t come.

I tried again. And again. Every night for a month I repeated the very same routine, yelling her name as loud as I could. Each night my voice sounded more desperate, more aching.

My dad and I searched the neighborhood by foot and then again by car. Each night I expected to see her trotting into the house, tail in the air, heading directly to her food dish, the way she used to, but that never happened.

Now, here she was, at the football field, but only for a moment. She climbed a tree and disappeared when she was halfway up. One moment she was there and then she wasn’t, just like everything else.

Memories popped like soap bubbles. Whenever I tried to hold onto them, they disintegrated in my hands, one after another.

The walls of water were closing in. Rushing waves crashed into streets and freeways swallowing cars, houses and the people in them. Everything crumbled around me until nothing else remained. The tides had caught up to where I was, there was no place else to run.

I stood in the middle of the world and surrendered. I just let it happen.

The water slammed into me with the force of a train. I let go of the struggle and allowed the black current to carry me away. I tumbled and tossed in the grips of the tides.

Everything washed away. I heard a thumping in the silence, like the beating of a heart, then nothing, then an endless buzz.



The man with the empty, tired eyes looked down at me. This time he was wearing blue scrubs stained with blood, my blood. My body was hooked to all kinds of machines. It was bloated and distorted from the blood transfusions. The sad, hollow faces of the nurses and assistants stood over me.

“You did everything you could to wake her up, doctor.”

The pain in my stomach was finally gone.





My friend and I had just seen a scary movie. Her car was on the other end of the parking lot so we said goodbye and parted ways. I was a row away from my white Toyota when it happened. This wiry kid, in his early 20s, popped out from between two parked SUVs. He wore a black baseball cap and black fingerless leather gloves. He was holding a hooked hunter’s knife and told me to give him all my money. “Come on, come on.” His hands trembled in jagged waves. He pushed his face inches from mine and gave me the meanest look I would ever see.



I pulled my wallet out of my purse but it, along with a bunch of coins, fell to the ground, clanking and clattering loudly. “Quiet,” he hissed. I bent down to pick up my wallet. He tried to yank my purse out of my hands as I arose but my arm was still stuck in the strap and flung hard into his.

He slapped my jaw with the back of his hand. I screamed. I shouldn’t have. But I did. He didn’t hesitate. He shoved the knife into my gut and back out, over and over and over again. Then he got the hell out of there. I fell into the side of a car, blood gushing out of my abdomen. I slid down the side of it and fell onto the ground.

I tried to yell for help but my cries came out in gurgled chokes. I was lying in fetal position, clutching my stomach. Blood was everywhere, flowing freely.

By the time somebody showed up the crows had already found me. They cawed and pecked at my hands and feet, squabbling with each other, shedding feathers. A two inch long roach had crawled onto my arm to rest. I was too weak to fling it off.

When the paramedics arrived I could barely see. They talked to me in hushed voices trying to soothe me and then all went black.





I rose out of my body from the hospital bed to look for my mom. She was sitting on a wooden chair in a small room holding her head in her hands, sobbing. The man with the pale face and tired eyes, my doctor, my hero, came into the room. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

He explained everything to her. He told her I’d fallen into a coma after the operation of my ruptured spleen. The blood loss had just been too significant. My organs had shut down one after the other. He had tried to do everything he could to wake me up. My mom went limp.

First my dad, now me.




I see the whole world now in a drop of rain. Tsunamis strike. Cities and buildings fall. Planes crash into towers and explode into bombs. Men cheat on their wives. Mothers tell their children they wish they’d never been born. People leave just when they are needed the most. The sun falls behind the earth leaving darkness and loneliness.

I spent a lifetime standing in the middle of the world, trying to stop everybody from leaving. But everything, including my life, simply pops like a bubble, in the end, and disappears into eternity.

And now it’s my turn to leave. Pop.