Megan sat on the edge of her
bed. She was waiting for her alarm clock to go off. It was set for 6:30 AM, but
she had been up an hour before her normal rising time. She was holding a cup of
cooling coffee in her lap. Her blue and pink robe draped carelessly over her
shoulders. Her hair was tangled in knots due to her prolonged night of
nightmares and tossing and turning. She still couldn’t get the eyes of that
poor man out of her head. She’d never seen eyes so terrified in her life. They
were haunting her.
The birds started chirping outside
her window as the purple dawn crept up over the backyard of her small house.
The house she got through the bank. The bank at which she worked. The bank that
was reopening today after a year of reconstruction and renovation. A year after
that man, whose name was Terry, was swallowed by the bank.
She’d been okay at the temporary
bank branch set up in the mall on route 22. That was okay, plus there was a
food court so she didn’t have to leave to get her lunch, which was nice. There
was just so much to see and interact with at the mall that she didn’t have to
think about that poor man. That poor Terry. She hadn’t been giving him a lot of
thought, until today. The police and rescue team said he was still looking up
when the found him. His eyes were still open. The mall though, the mall kept
her occupied and busy and shopping. She didn’t have to think about that man’s
face as she tried on shoes or outfits or laughed with her girlfriends at their
Friday after work drinks at the mall bar.
She shook her head and tried to
focus on getting back to her job; getting back to her old daily routine at the
new bank building. She clenched her toes in the carpet of her bedroom and then
let them relax. She took a deep breath. Her alarm burst to life; buzzing and
beeping and Megan shouted with fright. She was jumpy. She was too jumpy. She hurried
off the edge of the bed and slammed her hand on the alarm clock. She turned it
off instead of hitting the snooze, which she usually did.
“Gosh darn it,” she muttered as
she stood over the alarm clock and her dresser. She caught a glimpse of herself
in the mirror. She laughed at herself. Her hair was all matted to the left side
of her head and she still had pillow wrinkles lining her cheek. She looked like
a deranged surgery patient waiting for the “doctor” to see her. She laughed at
herself and put her coffee cup on the dresser. She made her way to her bathroom
to start getting ready for work. She had to shower and get cleaned up and find
something to wear for the grand reopening. She was one of the only employees
returning. Amy had gone on to work at the hair salon at the mall and she was
doing pretty well for herself. The majority of the rest of the staff just didn’t
want to come back after the bank fell down.
In her small pink bathroom, she
got to the business of getting ready. She was after all a practical woman who needed
this bank job and she still wanted to be on time and look her best. She still
had the strange fantasy that someday a handsome rogue might swagger his way
into the bank, come right up to her teller window and have the courage to ask
her out. They might go to Queen Crab and see the bad karaoke singers and have
Blue Hawaii’s until the sun came up and they held hands all through the night.
He would take her away from her hum-drum life and she would love him madly. And
he would adore her. She only wished it would come true. She knew that wasn’t
going to happen. She knew no knight in shining armor would waltz into the bank
and sweep her away into his limo or anything. She knew that was silly. But still…
Megan was shaking in the shower.
She was trying to calm herself down under the pulsing relaxation setting on the
shower head. It wasn’t working. She was
mad at herself for being so upset about it being a whole year since the bank
fell down around her and yet she was still being persecuted by the memory of
it. She was told that she might have
some post traumatic stress but she didn’t like that hypno psycho jibber jab.
She was a woman whose father taught her to deal with her troubles head on.
Although he was a raging alcoholic and did leave her mother when Megan was 17
to pursue his own selfish dreams of becoming a crab fisherman. She’d not seen
him since.
She turned off the massaging
head of the shower and turned the water off. She grabbed her towel and dried
herself off. She was feeling less shaky and thought she probably just needed a
little more for breakfast than the cup of coffee. She wrapped the towel around
her and flipped her wet hair down in front of her and began brushing it out.
She was looking down at her feet as she pulled her hairbrush though her long
hair. She realized she hadn’t had a hair cut since the accident. Her hair grew
slowly, but now, it was too long. She thought she should make an appointment
with Amy to get it taken care of. Her
eyes drifted toward her feet and the tile floor beneath her. The tiles. Yellow
and pink, an ugly combination. She hated the floor in her bathroom. She wished
it was something else, like wood maybe.
She imagined a wood floor in her
bathroom and how that would look. She wondered if it would look like the old
bank floor. She wondered if Terry looked down and saw that old wood floor
vanishing beneath him. She wondered what was going through his mind right
before he plummeted to the ground under the bank. She wondered what his
thoughts were as the great stained-glass dome finally came crashing down on top
of him. She imagined his pain and perhaps his surprise at his state. Megan felt
dizzy and had to straighten up. She brushed the hair out of her face and looked
at her reflection in the steamy mirror. She wiped the condensation off and
stared at herself.
“I’m not going to work today am
I,” she asked herself.
Her reflection shook her head
no.
“I’m never going back to that
bank am I,” she asked.
Her reflection shook her head
no.
“God damn it,” she said.
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