by Will Kolbrener

I May as Well Enjoy Myself

The Rapture wasn’t at all what it was supposed to be.

As far as I know–I’m not a very religious man, so I probably don’t know in the first place–is that this “Rapture” was supposed to be some gigantic event in which everyone’s souls are all judged at the same time, and that the pure of heart are to be sucked up into the blue to meet the magnanimous man in the sky.

Now, there’s a problem with my theory. Everyone but me was sucked up into the big blue vacuum cleaner.

Am I not pure of heart? Are the murderers, child-molesters and rapists all pure of heart?

Maybe.

This Rapture was completely indiscriminate. Everyone–gone like that. Right into space. Freeze dried for the black void to devour over centuries time, and the life breath of humanity–taken from them forever.

Me, though–I was left alone. A child who was never picked for a little football game with his friends. I was the metaphorical fat kid.

I felt left out; Cheated! I wanted to go with them, too! Take my hand and fling me out of the atmosphere! Show me the wonders of space just before I’m about to die, and let my dying breath be that of pure awe.

God’s gift to man, just before he takes man’s soul into his embrace for the rest of eternity.

Oh woe is me.

For I am not dead, but the planet around me is–save for the city’s animals.

Whom of which I’ll have to eat after I raid the supermarkets like a modern savage wearing used consumer goods and old cereal boxes for clothes.

Oh, that’ll be fun. I’ll stalk the aisles of headless chicken, eternally frozen in a dance, all for me, in their glass performance cases! I’ll prowl the supplement aisles in search of the most expensive pills–now liberated and free from their price tags! I’ll pounce and tear and rip at the bakery’s bread with my bear teeth as my ancestors once did during the depression, depraved and crazed with hunger!

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. I should probably find someplace to stay for the night. Anywhere will do. And… since everything’s free now, I think I’ll treat myself to the presidential suite in the most expensive hotel in town. That sounds really nice.

 

I Reflect on the Past

I’ve always wanted to own a coffee shop. There’s this nice one downtown right next to the hotel I had in mind.

It has that industrio-modern feel to it, with these chairs that are all cold-milled metal, and these low, black plastic coffee tables that look slick as hell and were probably straight from an IKEA magazine. I loved that place. When I worked in a little cubicle-cage on the fiftieth floor of the Main building, I would always go down to that shop and watch the men with the beards and big glasses pour me coffee with such grace that you’d think they went to school for it (Ha! Maybe they did! What a waste of a good education).

I’m a rampant caffeine addict, to tell you the truth. This was the best place that I had found to calm the angry voice in the back of my head that always demanded the dark, caffeine induced rush. The first time I’d tasted coffee was when I went out to breakfast with my father when I was fourteen.

When I took my first sip and felt my eyes widen and my mind quicken, I knew this was just the stuff to get me through the end of the world.

As I listened to my father talk and complain and drone about just how terrible his job was, the caffeine heightened my heartbeat and my hearing for a bit, and my body let me listen to other people’s complaining and droning, too.

It was then that I began to understand how trashed people really had made the world; with all of their complaining and droning and never doing anything to make their lives–or anyone else’s lives– any better. They just sat in their own shit.

Eventually, my father started to complain and drone about his respiratory problems.

You see, My father smoked. He smoked very often.

I hated it.

It gave me headaches and made me cough up chunks of my throat. He’d been doing it for however long I’ve lived on this rock.

He smoked in the car often, and he blew the vile secondhand straight back into the vehicle so that I could suck it up with my own lungs and become just like him.

Wouldn’t that be something? A disgusting human being with disgusting hygiene and a disgusting lifestyle, trying to raise another human to be just as disgusting as he was?

When he was done with his little cancer stick he would flick the sputtering cigarette butt out of the window and onto the road, only to join the millions and millions of other crushed and beaten and soggy cigarette butts that were thrown out of other human beings’ smoke-filled cars.

People did the same thing with all sorts of other mass produced, consumer-killing goods, too: plastic water bottles that gave people several sorts of cancer (but advertised environmentally friendly materials!), fast food which clogged countless arteries (but could feed the millions of middle-class and impoverished citizens!), and beer cans to inebriate drivers who probably crashed into a telephone pole and died (they were only having a good time!).

Feh.

When the world became trash, I had planned to sit upon the landfill throne and tell everyone that we had only brought it upon ourselves.

We were the harbingers of our own demise, sitting in a little box filled with our own shit and doing nothing but shitting some more to fill the box to our mouths. And whenever we screamed about it, we just shit some more and did nothing to solve our little crisis.

Isn’t that something?

At eighteen, I went to work for maintenance in my city. A good, honest blue-collar job. It paid fifteen dollars an hour, and it cost me nothing but my sanity and my faith in mankind.

Every day I would pick up the trash on the side of the highway with a stick that had a nail glued backwards on the end of it.

Every day I would imagine that every discarded plastic bottle and every little cigarette butt was part of my employer as I drove the nail into it as hard as I could, and imagined that it was his face or his forehead or his eye.

Trash duty took my hope, crumpled it up, handed me cynicism with a big grin and said, “Why wait for the trash can when your world is a big fucking trash bin? Go wild.”

It was landscaping that took my sanity, though.

You see, the job description told me I would be fixing pipes. That I would be descending into the unknown, uncharted territory of the sewers with only a headlamp and my good wits about me, trying to break into the temple of the sacred pipe-breach and fix the problem before I got too covered in everyone else’s poop.

It told me that I would be patching roads in my big, cowboy Ford truck with a pickup full of cold-patch tar; that I would and come home dirty and satisfied that I had helped to make the world just a little bit better by making the roads just a little bit smoother.

I wanted this job because I would be able to get my sleep back from pure exhaustion.

Instead, my job put a burlap bag on my head, bound and gagged me, and tried to kick me off of the cliff of my own well-being.

Allow me to explain:

My job description included landscaping.

My landscaping duties included weed-whacking.

I had to weed whack the entire poison plant family.

I’m very allergic to poison ivy.

Day after day it was my duty to spray myself on my arms, my legs, and my face with the shredded remains of these plants in the vain hope that they’d never grow back.

Day after day, more of the rash would appear on my body, sometimes in massive, red blisters that oozed when I gritted my teeth and wrung my hands to prevent myself from taking a potato peeler to my own skin.

And day after day I would continue to dutifully do my job.

Every morning I would come back to my shift wearing thicker clothing to try and prevent the plant from covering me, and to prevent myself from snapping and taking a power saw to my coworker’s skull.

Eventually, I just showed up to work in a full winter coat and a balaclava.

That day, I was just punching in my time sheet when my boss walked up behind me with his big gulp full of coca-cola that he probably planned to toss out the window of his Bentley when he was driving home from work.

He said, “The fuck are you wearing all that winter shit for? You robbing a ski-shop or something?”

I turned and looked at him with a dead glare.

I stared at his little, beady pig eyes. Then at the snicker on his face. Then at his fat sausage hands and the sweating, plastic, cola cup they were desperately clutching as if to fool himself that he was not, literally, a big fat failure.

And I just stared at him for a while, taking in this grotesque thing that was standing in front of me.

I hated it.

I hated him for taking up space.

I hated him for taking up air.

I hated him for breathing and talking and smelling like sweat and spoiled cheese wherever he went.

I hated him for letting itself get into such a sorry fucking state.

Oh God, what a waste of a human!

He was chucked into the sky, too, If I remember correctly.

Good riddance.

 

My Brain Makes Me Do Funny Things

Today, I contemplated suicide.

I had just managed to get some sleep last night after burying myself in all of the comforters I could find in the presidential suite of the hotel, and my conscious mind had decided to have at it with the chemicals in my brain that make me feel things.

The sun just came up, and it hit me straight in the eye as I stared at the little crack in between the curtains that I had left. I didn’t really care at first, since I had nothing to do that day (being that I was the last person on the planet who wasn’t either jettisoned from the atmosphere or having a giant party with the big man in the sky–neither of which I was invited to).

So me, being the big, grumpy pile of sheets that I was, I simply rolled off the bed and onto the floor to escape the sun. And I just lay there for a moment, processing my brain chemicals.

And then I had a thought.

I’m sure some very sick people had had this thought even before they all died from their ejection from Earth.

Me, and my down comforters for arms and fabric for legs, lying on the floor, I thought,

Why live?

I thought about it.

And I thought about it some more.

And I thought about it just a little more as I shed my sheets, took the elevator down to the lobby, and walked down to the nearest pawn shop.

And I contemplated the idea just for a smidge more as I found the keys to the glass case in front of me that were neatly hanging on a hook behind the counter where all of the fancy, leopard print guitars and the large, intimidating knives were.

And I poked and prodded the abstraction as I unlocked the case, slid the glass aside, and grabbed a nice, shiny, gunmetal black Beretta nine-millimeter from it’s little wooden stand.

And I conferenced with the little men in my head who wore perfectly straight, perfectly ironed, perfectly black business suits who were milling around in their business cabinets of my business conscious as I grabbed a box of business ammo from a nearby shelf.

And as I ripped the box open and loaded my clip and clicked the hammer back and cocked the weapon and shoved it into my mouth as far back as it would go so that I could taste the milled metal and death–I had another thought.

The chemicals were flowing.

They said, Why die now? I’m the last person left.

I can live–

however–

I–

want–

I thought about it. The businessmen paused from their business cabinets and their business papers–and they made an executive decision.

I put the gun down with a neat little clack.

And I walked out of the pawn shop.

 

God’s Forgotten Toy

People always ask other people what they would do if they were the last person on earth. Well, I am the last person on earth. And after ruling out killing myself, I’ve concluded that the best course of action would be to take over that coffee shop I mentioned earlier.

As far as I know, the power’s still on, since the people who ran the plant probably took the big suck before they could shut off their own machines, much less turn off the electricity to the town. As far as I know, there’s still customers’ hot coffee sitting on those slick IKEA tables.

It’s funny, though. This doesn’t look like the end of the world to me. It looks like everyone just went out to get some fresh air and never came back to their lives that were anchored here on earth by their spouse or their child or their boss. And suddenly, the chain to the anchor snapped, and they just went floating off like helium balloons after the birthday boy decided he didn’t like balloons anymore.

And me–I was his big, birthday gift.

The one in the box that the child shredded open to get, and clutched against his chest, and couldn’t wait to play with for the next week or so before he got another toy and shoved the other one into his closet to gather dust and simmer with the cheap plastic rage of being replaced by even more cheap plastic.

Eventually, the boy moves out. He moves on. To school, to college, and he boxes up all the toys and gives them away.

All but the one that was sitting in his closet for all those years.

I was God’s forgotten toy. My only neighbors were the empty sidewalks and the abandoned shops. I was His set-free balloon and His empty conscious.

…

I also had an extreme hankering for some coffee.

I Set Up Shop

 

The door was unlocked when I got to the coffee shop downtown. The owner must have gotten sucked up into the big black before he could lock up the place, and these cool, orange retro lamps were shining on the tables that were lined with empty chairs which weren’t even pushed in.

The bells that were hanging on the top of the door gave a little jingle as I pushed it open.

It was like everyone had some giant gathering that they all got a special invitation to.

Joke’s on them, though.

Now I get all the free coffee I want.

There was even a tepid pot of the stuff still under the industrial drip brewer.

Now, this place was cool. And I’m talking pour-over-coffee-with-little-heart-shaped foam, cool. I didn’t come here too often because, according to the hand-written prices on the blackboard behind the front counter and the pastry case, a six ounce cup of coffee was about eight-ninety-nine before everyone died.

I’m not paying that for my daily dose of caffeine–at least, not anymore (oh ho!).

I mean, yeah. I love good coffee, but holy shit; if that’s not completely ridiculous, I don’t know what is.

The pastries were even worse–price-wise, I mean.

They were delicious, though. I could have stuffed my face with many, many croissants if they weren’t as equally priced as a bank-breaking cup of coffee.

I’m getting off track though, staring at (now meaningless) prices.

I did manage to get the drip maker set up. Cleaned out the filters, found their gourmet stash of premium, imported African beans.

I nearly lost my hand in the process of dumping them into the industrial-sized coffee grinder, and–with such grace and gusto–managed to miss the grinder with the rest of the bag and dump most of the beans onto the floor.

I did eventually get some grounds into the drip maker after I cleaned up my mess.

And then I sighed.

I thought about the gun that I put in my mouth because the funny chemicals in my head made me do so.

I thought about my anger, my resentment and my contempt.

…

Maybe it was me, who had trashed the world.

Maybe it was me who hated everything so much; I had projected so much angst–so much bitterness onto the world and the people and the ones I used to love–that they eventually became what my mind wanted them to become:

Trash.

I wanted to forgive the trash–my trash.

I wanted to forget my anger and my bitterness.

I wanted to kill my contempt.

So I closed my eyes.

And I took a deep breath.

And I just imagined, for a moment, all of this black fog. This black, angry, swirling energy inside of me; and floating out of the chaos, came a small, chrome sphere.

So I stared–peering into the little ball. And inside, I could see everything. I could see all of me. All of my emotions and my fears.

When I was little, I had a fear that no one would be there to love me when I grew up.

When I was a teenager, I had a fear that my parents would find out all the strange things that I had been doing (a whole different story)–I was embarrassed and scared and shared my shame with no one.

And the anger–oh, the anger. I had fed it and nurtured it. Gave it candy and sweets when it cried, and so it grew into a monster. It came to control my thoughts and my hands and my head.

I stared at this terrible thing for a while, it’s face swirling in the black.

I peered at it, and it peered back at me, both of us like confused children at daycare for the first time, and seeing someone just like us. As frail as us. As vulnerable as us. As human as us.

Our parents were gods, but this one–I like him because he’s just like me.

This anger is a part of me; I can’t change even if I wanted to at this point. So, I took another breath, and the face faded back into the mist.

I held my hands to my chest, taking a final breath, and breathed outwards, imagining the mist going flying out of my body from my hands. Out into the coffee shop.

Out the door.

Into the sky. Just–away.

I opened my eyes.

The coffee was done, lovely and hot under the drip-maker. I took it and sat at a small, empty table with the empty chairs that looked like people had gotten up and left in a hurry.

For the first time in a long time, I felt good. I mean, really good. Like something had been un-lodged from the inside of my chest that had been stuck there for years.

I stared at my coffee, placing my nose just above the foamed surface, closed my eyes, and inhaled–deeply inhaled–as if I was trying to drink the coffee through my nose (I have attempted that once before when I was younger. It was a dare. It was very painful).

Oh, caffeine, my dark mistress, miss liquid obsidian. How I’ve missed you so.

As I exhaled, I heard the door jingle, as if it was being opened.