On September 7th 2027 I decided I wanted to die by hurricane. Garrett had become a category five the day prior and landfall was predicted on the 9th. Wind speeds around its eye were record breakers insofar as modern history was concerned, 175 and above.
My mother and father had died by hurricane, back in 2022. Felicia had only been a three, but it had moved slowly and brought torrential rains and a storm surge of fifteen feet as a consequence. It had literally drowned our small town, washed it all away. I clung to a stray tire, survived a roller coaster ride of jagged debris and crackling power lines, spent an eternity in driving rain before the national guard rescued me.
The mandatory evacuation orders came and I ignored them. I drove to the beach instead, in a beat up Ford whose engine had a bad belt. It whined and screamed and chittered in alternate rythms, like a flock of bats startled from a cave by a shotgun blast. The windshield boasted a starburst of sparkling cracks from a tree branch felled by Felicia, the AC had quit, and the tires were bald.
I hated my life. My parents were dead. I had flunked college. My boyfriend had dumped me for a prettier vixen and I was the unhappy holder of a position as clerk at the local McDonalds. It payed for a bug infested studio on the seedier side of town and put a decent bottle of liquor on the cracked counter of its kitchen provided I worked overtime, yet it also stole the soul.
Rudeness grates, and customer after customer causes consciousness to find a certain winter, forces it to ice over. You can hand out a trillion bags of burgers and fries and iced tea and soda and cookies yet so few of the faces you see are grateful...merely expectant. The food industry is so fucking transactional, the patron has payed and now they want what they want fast...and when they don't get it fast, when a frialator breaks or a system glitch erases their order they get more beligerent than I ever could on my worst night, take it out on the face at the window.
It wasn't the job though, no. Not really. It was...I missed my parents and because I had lost them I didn't know what there was to really value in me. I'd lay the bright red button down shirt with the yellow M down on the bed and just stare at it with a drink in paw.
Anyone could do it, I remember thinking. No one would miss me, no one missed my parents. They'd died, became a media statistic several years ago, but that was it. My dad was a fisherman, my mother a florist. It was never important.
Following in their tracks, as a clerk at McDonalds there were billions who could have stood in my place.
So die, something whispered.
I became convinced they were waiting for me. They were. Even if it were in oblivion, a great devouring nowhere, we'd be together. The void is where the swords of heaven and hell lock, one edge grinding and sparking against the other, the rift between bitter and unjust extremes ripped open by cruel and hateful conviction as both forces try to destroy one another. I think it's where we all should go, if only for spite. Freedom isn't what we think, I think. Bowing to one or the other is bitter sweet and the rewards they offer if one reflects twice are only skin deep.
-
A hurricane's face is a roiling, ominous wall, the colour of a fresh bruise as night falls. It's black and purple, scarred by serrated bolts of dueling lightning, and the surf of the coast is whipped into scary chop and high waves as the winds rise from salt laden whispers to a roaring scream.
As it devours the blue, that front of black and restless clouds that stretches from horizon to horizon, as you realize it's far too late to run, time seems to slow. Peaceful summer skies, fluffed clouds just an hour before, have become a monster.
I stand and face it, a fifth in my paw. I'm so drunk the world is spinning and I sink to my knees. The coast guard has long fled, evacuated, there's no rescue for me now.
I want to vomit yet somehow I hold the bile back. I see the face of my mother and my father and press my muzzle against the warm sand.
The rain starts. I take a drink, soaked in the deluge and too stoned to think.
The wave was forty feet tall, something told me to run yet I made no move at all.