Total pages in book: 44
Estimated words: 40274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 201(@200wpm)___ 161(@250wpm)___ 134(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 201(@200wpm)___ 161(@250wpm)___ 134(@300wpm)
“Sure I can. Nobody’s going to miss you, Jess. You’re a nothing. A nobody. A drug stealing slut. I’ll be doing the world a favor by getting rid of you.”
“Alright, fuck, come on, dude. Remember that time we went to Atlantic City?”
I’m trying to remind him of better times. Times before we were reduced to this. Times before he hated me. Times before I hated him. It was nice, once. It’s hard to believe that now. Desperate times lead to some crazy fucking shit.
Rick doesn’t remember when we went to Atlantic City. The drugs he takes have carved out a hole where happy memories used to be and now everybody he knows is an enemy, especially me.
I keep backing up, saying everything I can think of to say to calm him down, but Rick’s not having it. I don’t think he cares about the drugs anymore. Every bit of his being is devoted to the idea that hurting me is going to solve everything.
I’m thinking this might be where it ends for me. I can’t get back down off the roof. I’m not fast enough. It’s way too tall to jump off, at six stories, and eventually he’s going to get me boxed in, and then….
BWAAAAAAAAAAAMMMM!
A deep resonant sound echoes across what feels like the entire world, but definitely across the entire city. It’s a sound designed to get attention, one so strange and so all encompassing it seems to come from everywhere at once.
Rick and I pause our life-and-death cat and mouse for a second to look up. Something is happening. The day was gray before this moment, heavily overcast with clouds that looked as though they wanted to rain, but also didn’t want to give us the satisfaction of being rained on. Those clouds are boiling away quickly. The light is changing, both in quality and quantity. A warm glow suffuses the city with a liquid caramel glaze, sort of like a sunset, but it’s two o’clock in the afternoon and it’s way brighter.
It’s like the sun coming out, but the sun is already out. This is a brighter light, a warmer light. It bathes us in more than light. It brings with it a comforting glow that seems to sink right through my skin and to the core of me. I feel happy. Not a brief burst of cheap serotonin, but the kind of happy I last remember feeling when I was very small, before I realized how wrong things were. I feel a kind of deep contentment and safety I’d almost forgotten completely.
When I look over at Rick, he has a similarly happy expression on his face. He drops the knife he was holding and smiles at me.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m going to go.”
“Alright.”
Rick walks right off the side of the fucking building. I want to scream, but I can’t because of the crazy fixed smile stuck on my face. I continue to feel good and settled and happy even as I witness what has to be the worst thing I ever saw. I didn’t hate Rick. Not as much as I should have. Rick was part of some good, hopeful, normal times.
I’m shocked to see Rick fall, not down in the usual way, but suddenly, up. He comes past me, twirling like an autumn leaf being plucked from a tree. He is not the only one. I can see specks all across the city, some bigger and nearer, some smaller and far away. All of those specks are people for whom gravity seems to have suddenly reversed itself.
The last I see of Rick, he is being absorbed into a heavenly glow. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing for him. I know that I feel so generally happy it doesn’t matter. All the trauma I should be experiencing is being gently simmered away in the warmth of the strange glow.
“Don’t worry. Be happy. Everything is going to be alright,” a voice intones from the heavens. “The Cupid have arrived to ensure peace, happiness, and a future for all mankind. Be at peace.”
I look down at the city below the building. I can see for a few blocks around, and I’m seeing hundreds of people staring upward into the light, listening to that deep voice tell us everything is going to be okay. There’s a moment, a very brief moment, in which everything is okay. Everything is fine.
And then it’s not.
As the light fades, chaos sweeps across the city. A lot of people just got sucked the hell up into the sky, and that has caused some issues. There’s also the effect of withdrawal from the glow. Real life suddenly feels painfully mundane and heavy. It’s like coming down from a drug we didn’t intend to take, one that got into all our veins for a very short time.