The sky continues to pour snow like a faucet on full blast. With everyone else at work, Francine heads out with the snow shovel and tries to clear the walk for the postal carrier and the driveway for Jake and Masani. After an hour's work shoveling, she reaches the end of the driveway and then notices that so much snow has fallen that she really should shovel the walk again.
She takes a nap instead. If she could, she'd sleep through the entire winter, a pleasant hibernation, but she'd probably freeze to death because the gas company would shut off service if they hadn't been paid since the fall.
Inside, in the warm fuzz of her blankets and bed, she dreams of shoveling more snow. Then the snow turns to Mart Mart customers, who are even harder to shovel than wet snow since they are heavier and complain when the shovel catches them in a sensitive spot. Gradually she floats into the air and the shovel and snow are forgotten. She hovers above the Cleaveland metropolitan area and sees the toy buildings at the center, the human ants scurrying downtown, the tiny cars on the roads, and the little strips of green here and there, cut up by little dot houses, the whole thing looking like a jigsaw puzzle put together by a drunk. She can even see all the way across the large lake into Canada. She waves to the Canadians, but no one waves back. She's rather shocked because she always thought they were polite. Maybe they couldn't see her up in the clouds. Then she shoots down and hovers like a ghost at the gas station ("Fossil Fueling, No Fooling") around the corner from her house, and watches the clerk, worried that the world is going to end, decide that she doesn't want to spend her last moments selling beer and cigarettes, so she leaves. A fuel truck pulls up after she leaves. The driver gets out and looks around for the clerk, shrugs his shoulders, and leaves. Running on fumes, a car pulls up to get gas, but there's no gas to get, so the driver gets out, smashes the glass on the window with a tire iron, steals some beer, and walks off somewhere. Francine finds it ironic that in a society supposedly so concerned about drunk driving gas stations sell alcohol. More cars pull up and and occasionally a driver will leave some money for something, but most of them loot the station. Francine hears police sirens but no cops ever show up. When there's no more stuff to steal, someone sets the station on fire for fun. A crowd gathers to watch it burn. A couple of people all wearing Cleaveland Browns National Football League officially licensed clothing try to hook up some garden hoses to put out the fire, but the water isn't flowing since everyone at the water treatment plant decided to quite working as well, and ditto for the electrical plant and ditto for the coal mines that power the electric plant that power the pumps for the water treatment plant. Francine is puzzled by the mayhem she witnesses and wonders how this could have happened so quickly. Finally the crowd turns ugly and, hungry, decide to eat someone walking by who wears Pittsburgh Steelers National Football League officially licensed clothing. They roast the poor rival football team's fan over the flames of the gas station and then munch on pieces of him that resemble the giant turkey legs sold at the football stadium. Then still hungry, the Browns fans argue over who should be the starting quarterback, and the small woman who thinks the third string quarterback should start because he's the cutest of the three gets roasted and eaten as well. Eventually the fire dies out and the crowd, barking and burping, disperses but decides to meet here again since it's even more fun than tailgating before a game. One expresses regret that the gas station was all out of peanuts, which would have gone well with the tangy taste of the last football fan they ate.
Francine wakes and wonders what she ate to bring on a dream like that. Her stomach growls and she is disturbed to find herself thinking that a giant leg of turkey would be quite welcome at the moment. She goes downstairs and looks out the window.
The snow continues to fall.
She hopes civilization doesn't.
Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.
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