"Quiet Rapture"
Flooding #9
L’il shorty here (500 words), and the last from 2006, as well as the last from the “Flooding” section of the collection. Next (and last), we’re onto the “Surface Evolution” portion, which is 2007–2011. I haven’t written a short story since 2011, so that’s 13 years ago now. Wow. Well, I have been (very) occasionally pecking at my next novel, so at least there’s that.
Anyway, enjoy!
Æ
QUIET RAPTURE
Choking, gagging on his coffee. But he’s working late, so no one hears him. Stupidly, he sits in the chair at his desk and splutters until saliva dribbles down his chin. He turns a dark shade of blue, then falls out of his chair. Crumples into a heap under his desk.
The next morning, the first co-worker to come into the office spots him, panics, drops her purse, spins around several times where she stands, and runs to her desk to dial 911.
By the time anyone else arrives on the scene, the man’s body is gone.
*
Swerving, weaving in and out of traffic, cutting people off. Laughing. Trying to impress the woman seated next to him. It’s working. She smiles and giggles when other drivers flip them the bird or honk their horns.
A light mist has been falling for about twenty minutes, just slicking the roads up enough. Slow car coming up in the passing lane. Too slow. Brakes slam on, red lights flash in the night. The front of the fast car crashes hard into the slower car’s rear-end, launching it into a light pole on the side of the street. The driver’s body smashes through the windshield, lands on someone’s lawn, a tattered, bleeding rag with a crushed skull.
The driver of the fast car avoids the light pole, but slams straight into a cement truck coming the opposite direction. In an instant, the driver of the car and his easily impressed female companion become two quick-spray chunks of bone and gristle, flattened against the dashboard and windshield. They drip from the car’s accordioned interior.
The cement truck driver twists his neck a little, and suffers a few scratches, but is otherwise unharmed. A poster boy for seat belts. And cement trucks.
Several onlookers call an ambulance and the police.
The body on the lawn vanishes from sight, right in front of the homeowner’s eyes; the man and the woman from the fast car disappear before anyone can get to them, leaving no trace that they were ever there.
Blood, bone, mind, and soul: gone.
*
Two policemen, side by side. The mist from earlier now coming down a little harder. Almost genuine rain. One writes in his notepad; the other just stares at the wreckage from a train crash that happened less than half an hour ago. Twisted metal scattered all around; burning chunks of seating, shattered glass. Over 200 people travelling on one train when it hit another train carrying nearly 150 people.
When the smoke cleared, dazed passengers stumbled out of the train, clambered over wreckage. Mostly scratched, bruised, and in shock. One or two had lost limbs and a lot of blood waiting for paramedics. But of over 350 passengers, none were dead; there were no bodies anywhere.
Once passenger lists were compiled, it was discovered—and noted by the policeman with the notepad—that ninety-two people had apparently “wandered off.”
No one ever heard from any of these people again.
*
After several years of these occurrences, with the world no closer to understanding what was happening, the front page of The New York Times ran two snapshots side by side of graffiti sprayed across brick walls. The first one was of the side of a high school in Brooklyn, New York, and it read: “God has taken them, bodies and all.”
The second photograph was of the side of a sushi shop in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and, translated, the caption read: “Soon he will start taking the living.”