She first wakes at seven in the morning. Summer sunlight blazes through the curtains, filling the room with light. The weather man had forecast a warm, sunny day today, and it looks like he was right.
She lazily reaches over and grabs her phone off of the night stand, trailing its cord behind it as she pulls it to her face. “6:58” it says on its screen. She puts it back
Part of her says to get up and make the most of the day, but another part of her says to go back to sleep for another hour. A mental argument ensues.
“Today is finite; there will be plenty of time to rest later! You have to get ready for the show!”
“Yes, today is finite, so why face it being tired and cranky? You will have plenty of time to get ready even if you sleep a little longer.”
She goes back to sleep.
It is shortly after eight when she wakes again. This time she does get up. She makes the bed, showers, does her hair, grabs her phone, and heads out to the kitchen.
Popping bread into the toaster and a pod into the coffee maker, she looks in the fridge while the toast toasts and the coffee brews. The roast is defrosted, but she decides that she does want potatoes with it after all, so a trip to the store is definitely in order.
Toast on a plate, coffee in a mug, she sits down at the dining room table. While she eats her breakfast she reviews the messages on her phone.
“R U sure you won't come w/ us? We R leaving 1st thing in the morn,” says a text from last night, “Theres room in the car and there should B enough food. Plz come w/ us.”
It would be too late to go now even if she wanted to; they're already going to be halfway to the mountain if they are lucky. If they are unlucky, they are stuck in traffic, and who wants to spend today in a traffic jam?
More texts. Some inviting her to parties, some just thanking her for being a friend, a couple inviting her to church. She had never really stopped to think about how many friends she has. She isn't quite sure how she feels about that.
Breakfast finished, she washes the dishes and sets them in the strainer to dry.
She decides that she had better hit the store early; she doesn't know what their stock is going to be like nor how busy they will be. She gets dressed, grabs her purse, and heads out the door.
The roads in town are empty. She sees only a couple other cars and a few people on foot. A couple wave to her, and she gives them a cheery wave back.
The lack of people doesn't surprise her. Many people left town over the weekend, and she is sure that most of the people who are left are probably at church. She is happy to spend today alone though, she has always been most comfortable with herself.
She is a little surprised when she passes the comic shop and can see a bunch of people inside busily playing Dungeons and Dragons or something else she would find equally incomprehensible. Some of the people are even in costume, and this makes her happy; everyone should spend today doing something they enjoy.
When she gets to the store, the lights are all on, and the doors are sitting open, but the place seems deserted. Many of the shelves are empty, or nearly so; a lot of people stocked up for today. She is relieved to find the produce section still pretty well stocked, and guesses that most people were getting non-perishable items.
She finds a decent looking bag of potatoes, a few good carrots, and some string beans. She had tinned green beans at home, but figures that dinner today should be special.
She is disappointed to find the liquor aisle completely empty. Even the cheap wines are gone. She decides to see if she can get a bottle from the neighbor.
There's no checker at the cash registers. She looks around looking for anyone in a bright blue apron or vest, but finds no one. She waits for a minute, staring at the covers of the magazines on the impulse rack.
“Is TomKat Getting Back Together?” asks a tabloid dated for two weeks ago.
“President Obama really a Reptilon!” declares another.
“50 Easy Recipes That You Can Make In 30 Minutes!” screams the cover of a magazine showing a roast turkey that was most certainly not made in thirty minutes.
She glances briefly at the cover of Time Magazine featuring a picture of the newly discovered asteroid, Gaga. The cover promises an interview with the man who discovered it.
“Hello!” she calls out impatiently, and her voice echoes through the store.
After another minute, she walks around the check stand, grabs a paper sack, and bags her own groceries. She stuffs a twenty dollar bill into a slot on the front of the cash register's till, grabs her produce, and heads to the car.
For the drive home, she decides to take a different route. This one passes a couple of churches, which, judging by the number of cars parked around them, are apparently doing quite a business today. It's not that she's against church, per se, but more that she believes that God can hear her wherever she goes so there is little reason to spend today there.
At home, she checks the time, just after eleven. She decides she'd better get the roast going.
It takes her the better part of an hour to clean, peel, and cut her potatoes and carrots, prepare the roast, and get it into the oven. She sets the timer to remind her to check on the roast in an hour, and then leaves the kitchen.
Plugging her iPod into the stereo, she floods the quiet house with some light classical to listen to while she does a little cleaning. She just vacuums and dusts, taking care as always when dusting around her collection of glass penguins.
Once she is satisfied that the house is clean enough to keep her from being anxious about it, she checks on the roast. She spoons some of the juices that have flowed out over it, and closes the oven door.
She walks to her next door neighbor's house. She doesn't think they are home, but tries the doorbell anyway. When she gets no answer, she knocks loudly. Still getting to answer, she goes to the conspicuous chunk of granite sitting in the flowerbed next to the porch.
Picking up the rock, she turns it over and opens the compartment on the bottom. She takes the hidden key out and tosses the rock back into the flowerbed, crushing one of the smaller snapdragons.
Using the key to open the door, she sticks her head inside and calls, “Hello! Anybody home?”
Only silence answers.
“Hello!”
Still nothing, which is what she had expected.
“I'm coming in,” she calls, and enters the house.
She drops the key on the little table next to the coat rack, and closes the front door. She is a little surprised to find the house is a mess; it had always been so tidy when she had come over before. There are clothes, half filled suitcases, photo albums, and knick knacks so ugly that they can only be family heirlooms all over the front room; it looks like a garage sale exploded in there.
She feels a little surge of pride that at least her house is tidy today.
She goes into the kitchen to find many of the cabinets sitting open and empty. Luckily the counter top wine cellar from Sharper Image is still full. She remembers how proud her neighbors had been of this when they first showed it to her. She was not particularly impressed by it (although she never let them know that), but is quite glad that it's here now.
She pulls open the cooler's door and starts looking through the bottles of wine,sliding out each shelf to see what they hold. She selects a nice, and she thinks fairly expensive, Chablis, and closes the cooler.
She doesn't bother locking the door when she leaves; there's really no point. Once back in her own house, she puts the wine in the fridge, which is probably not the right temperature, but then she never was a real wine snob, and checks on the roast again.
Probably another hour, she guesses as she pulls the thermometer's probe out of the meat. She bastes it again.
She takes the green beans to the sink, cleans them, breaks off the ends, and places them in a bowl. She stick the bowl in the fridge.
She leaves the kitchen, goes to the bedroom, and grabs a book off of the nightstand. She had been trying to finish it last night, but fell asleep. She decides that if she is ever going to finish it now's the time.
She is just finishing the last page as the timer beeps. She is satisfied with the ending, glad she finished it, glad she hadn't wasted this time reading something crappy and disappointing; something anti-climactic. She places the book down on the coffee table, and heads back to the kitchen.
She opens the oven, and stabs the meat with the thermometer probe again. One hundred and fifty degrees. Perfect. She grabs the pot holders, and carefully removes the pan from the oven, placing it on a cooling rack on the counter. She bastes the roast one more time before grabbing a roll of foil out of the cabinet. She pulls off a big piece of foil to cover the meat with while it rests.
Roast done, she grabs a saucepan and steamer basket from another cabinet. She puts the green beans from the fridge into the basket, and then puts the basket and some water in the saucepan before putting the whole thing on the stove.
Once the beans are ready, she plates them. She puts some of the potatoes and carrots on her plate, and then carves herself some of the roast. She had originally bought the roast with the idea of inviting people over, but the time for that just got away from her.
She places her early dinner on the table, and then retrieves the wine from the refrigerator. She spends almost five minutes looking for the corkscrew before giving up. She remembers that her dad's old pocket knife is in her desk, and uses the corkscrew on that to open her wine.
She quietly eats her supper and sips her wine as classical music continues to flow through her house. She goes back for seconds, something she almost never does, but it seems a shame to let all that food go to waste.
She feels calm. She feels peaceful. She feels like drawing.
She finishes her dinner, not rushing through it like she normally would, but savouring each bite. This may be the best roast she's ever made, even if she does say so herself.
When she is done eating, she places her plate and silverware in the sink, refills her wine glass (her neighbors do have good taste in wines), and moves back to the living room where she abandons the wine glass on the coffee table.
She goes tot he garage and gets a foldable card table and a camping chair. She takes these out in front of her house and sets them up in the street facing east so that the sun will be at her back. She then runs back inside and grabs a sketch pad and some pencils from her office.
She also takes her headphones, her iPod from the stereo, and her wine glass, and goes out front to where her table and chair sit in the empty street. She sits down and starts to draw while listening to the music of Chopin, Beethoven, and Granados fill her head.
She sketches her street, her house, a tree across the street. She sketches her friends, using pictures from her phone to aid her. She sketches the future she wanted to have, her with a husband and child, though in the picture they have no faces, standing in front of a large house. The sketches are some of the finest she has ever done. She always knew she was better than some of the stuff she had been turning out, she just needed the right motivation.
She looks at the clock on her phone, “5:00”. It's about time for the show to start.
She looks up into the eastern sky, and she can see it; something flying in the air. Flying is not right, she realizes, it is falling. Gaga is falling to Earth as a ball of fire with a tail of smoke. The picture on the cover of the magazine didn't do it justice; it's like watching a small city plummeting from the sky.
The object falls from sight, obscured by the houses lining the street, but she can see the flash over them as it hits. She can hear the rumble start.
She drains her wine glass, and places it on the table. She turns up her iPod until the music hurts her ears, drowning out the rumbling noise, and she stands, moving around to the front of the table, facing the direction of the flash. The show has started and it is too late to do anything other than watch.
She can see it, can see the shock wave distorting the air. She can see it coming. Chopin blares in her ears as a single tear runs down her cheek; a single tear for every lost friend, every missed opportunity, and every hope and dream that she had that will never come true.
A single tear for what was and what could have been.
The shock wave is pushing a wall of wreckage and debris before it; it's a tidal wave of death and destruction. Time seems to slow.
She stands there defiantly as the sound and fury rush towards her. She does not run. She does not scream. She stands tall and strong; back straight, chin our like her father taught her. She stands as the wind picks up around her, as her sketches are thrown from the table and onto the ground and into the air, as her wine glass tumbles and shatters unseen and unheard on the street behind her.
And then, as if she were never there at all, she is gone.