A few weeks ago, Sandra was awakened in the depths of night by her phone loudly beeping and flashing. The word WARNING was scrolling across her screen and a brief panic swept over her as she imagined nuclear armageddon or an alien invasion.
As a side note, you can’t believe what a struggle I had with autocorrect to stop it from capitalizing “armageddon.” Just because something is mentioned in the bible, doesn’t mean it gets capitalized in my book. I’m clearly using it as a generic reference to an end of the world scenario, so hold the A.
And that end of the world scenario ran through Sandra’s head as she opened the message to find that it was only a flood alert.
Sandra lives on high ground. Very high ground. The only end of the world scenario involving a flood at her house would have to involve an ark containing two of every animal.
You’ll notice I didn’t capitalize ark either. I like to be consistent.
Sandra sat in bed, wide awake at three in the morning, and raged at the government and their intrusion into her life and sleep. “Nanny state bullshit,” she fumed. If they didn’t have the technology to determine who would and would not be affected by the flood, they shouldn’t have abused their authority by waking everyone just to reach only a few people, was her opinion.
Last night, she again woke up with a start.
The dream started with her in line for some sort of attraction. It was unclear exactly what. She was herded onto an open top double-decker bus but instead of a regular seat, she was led into an individual compartment on the second level (a dressing room, maybe?). The man standing in the booth next to her looked a lot like Karl Pilkington. In retrospect, she assumed that was because she always associated double-decker buses with being British.
You’ll note that I have no problem capitalizing British. To my knowledge, it was never directly mentioned in the bible. As another side note to note, had the bible mentioned Karl Pilkington, I would have been much more impressed with it.
In her dream, she’s driving along when suddenly, on a road stretching between the mainland and some small island, water starts to pour in from either side. She stands up to warn the other passengers when the flooding starts to swallow up cars in front of them. She feels panic welling up as she realizes Karl is trying to hang on to her. She rips his hands off of her and shouts at him that she can’t swim.
That’s a lie. While she is definitely not a strong swimmer, she can swim. Any mixed emotions about her reaction are soon swept away as the water reaches the second level of the bus and she is forced to try and leap off the bus and grab a hold of the metal railing that has somehow materialized over the highway.
She hurls herself out of the bus and swims and somehow manages to climb up the railing to safety. Karl does not fare so well. The moment her feet are clear of the water, she clutches the heavy black metal but there is no water anywhere to be seen. She is in a sleepy small town on a beautiful day with the sun shining down. She steps down from the railing and starts to walk and then she wakes up, her heart still hammering in her chest from her close call.
It takes a while but she ends up thinking she was wrong about the government sending out the flood warning a few weeks back. She regrets the nasty email she sent to local authorities.
I personally don’t agree with her conclusion at all. How she arrived at it is beyond me. I guess I should have warned you that Sandra is a crazy person.