No Personal Politics

She awoke to a sharp ringing in her ears. As she slowly opened her eyes she very groggily noticed everything seemed very hazy and gray. Usually her bedroom was sunny in the morning when she woke up. She reached over to the night stand for her glasses, but there was no nightstand to her left like usual. She realized with every passing second, that she had a screaming headache. She tried to sit up, but it felt like someone was sitting on her stomach. She wiped what she thought was sleep from her eyes, but it was very gritty. As she looked around as best she could without her glasses, she realized it was not a person that was sitting on her, but a chunk of ceiling. She went to lift it off. It was a medium size piece of plaster. The fact that a piece of ceiling had just been resting on her didn’t register, nor did the fact that she had been laying on a cement floor, not on a bed. She started crawling around the floor, trying to find her glasses. She found them about four feet from where she had been laying, next to a pile of broken glass. She cleaned the lenses off with her shirt, and put them back on. She sat there, and realized she was at work. Except that it wasn’t. Part of the front counter was gone. The bakery case was only a piece of twisted metal. The tables and chairs, what was left of them were at either side of the dining area. The espresso machines where scattered. One was embedded into the wall behind her; the other was lying over by the coolers. Then she noticed the bodies. Her coworker Deliah was laying on the ground, impaled near the bathroom doors with a piece of the bakery case sticking out of her back. The Tuesday morning elderly ladies church group was not near the front window where she remembered them sitting. Half the wall and the windows either. She saw a leg sitting just outside the store, on the sidewalk. She had no idea where the rest of the person that should be attached to the leg was.

She stood there, in shock, still unable to grasp what she was looking at. It was more like a scene she saw on the news; something that happened to other people, in other countries. Not in the heartland of America at a coffee shop. A man came running in and shouted something at her. She couldn’t hear what he was saying. He shouted something but it just came out garbled. Her head was pounding, and her ears where still ringing. He carefully made his way to her, picking his way through debris. And picked her up, and proceeded to carry her back out of the store, the way he came in. As he was carrying her, she noticed she had a piece of one of the chair legs sticking out of her thigh. The man took her across the street, and placed her down on the curb. He placed a sweatshirt around her, and appeared to ask her a question. She stared at him blankly still unable to hear. Just then 3 squad cars came screaming up, followed almost immediately by two fire trucks. She collapsed.

She awoke again. She was in the back of an ambulance. She could hear sirens. The paramedic sitting next to her smiled, and grabbed her hand. She started to sob.