And the Room Shook

The party had been going for a few hours and Lauren was still in the same position as she had been since it began, on the peripheries watching these strangers drink, dance and shamelessly touch one another. Taking the final drag of her cigarette, she stabbed it out on the wall and walks over to Bella who was currently lying upside down, like an astronaut, on the three-piece suite that had been moved into the middle of the room and tipped on its back.

“Bella? Whisky? Any more?” Lauren said to her inverted friend who then proceeded to perform a backward roll that prompted a brief applause from her sofa companions and the boy sat opposite who observed her cotton dress slip over her head. She swayed to the kitchen and passed Lauren the bottle, kissing on the cheek saying “Make friends. We are nice. Though... Damon may be a little nicer than the others”. She winked slowly. Give her ten minutes and she’ll be out for the night, Lauren thought as she stared into the dilated pupils of her friend.

Lauren walked over to Damon who turned and smiled as he saw her approaching, “I wondered when you might come talk to me” and offered her his snow-covered mirror. She’d promised herself on the flight over that she would not partake in any extra-curricular narcotics, excluding the Xanax she had stored in her purse, of course. To take the edge off. But it would have been rude not to accept Damon’s kind offer. They both slid down the wall to sit down. She rested her head on the wall, feeling the soft vibrations of the bass seeping through. They seemed to ripple into the ground itself. The room taking on the heartbeats of the bodies inside it. Lauren opened her eyes to see a framed art print fall from its position on the opposite wall, the glass cracking on impact. The walls slid into the floor around the room. “Strong hey?” Damon whispered to her. Through squinting eyes, Lauren watched a mug work its way to the end of a table, balancing precariously on the edge before falling to the ground, covering the feet of a sleeping girl in its contents.

She recalled a documentary her and Victor had watched one evening about San Francisco and the 1906 earthquake that destroyed the city. 3,000 people died. Lauren looked around at the dozens of entwined bodies lying motionless around the room, seemingly oblivious to the disintegrating room. Or perhaps happily believing it was a product of their choice that night.  As a shelving unit wavered and began to move, slow motion, in the direction of her and Damon, sat in its shadow, the haze that had clouded her for nearly three years lifted and she stood up. It is a choice. And this has got to stop.