Belmont fell into the cracked, worn leather of his couch and let his head sag sideways until it landed against the armrest, pushing out a whoosh of stale air from the foam interior through the pores in the second-hand sofa. Then, slowly, he rolled onto his back and looked up, letting his eyes meet the slow rotation of the ceiling fan above him.

“Fuck.”

In his typically over-dramatic fashion, he kept his head on the back edge of the couch while simultaneously trying to reach the paper on the coffee table by his knees, stretched like some gummy prize from the twenty-five cent gumball machine. Several moments of groaning, stretching, and grasping fingers later, Bel gave up with a long sigh. Unready to relinquish his drama just yet, though, he swung his head back far too quickly, planning to snatch the paper off of the table. However, his theatrics only served to make himself dizzy as the blood rushed to his head. In that brief spinning moment, there was a fleeting emptiness that allowed him to forget why life had begun to suck so hard, but then it was gone. Once his eyes stopped swimming circles in his skull, he looked at the paper with furrowed brow and snatched it from the table triumphantly, then repeated the process all over again, letting his head lay back on the couch and looking back up towards the fan.

“Fuck.”

He pulled the paper up and looked at it, placing it between himself and the rotating blades above him so that the page wafted slightly in the breeze. The letter had been printed on lightweight paper in twelve-point whatever-the-fuck-font, double-spaced and justified end to end. All the punctuations were periods, and all the bullet points were daggers into his soul.

“Dear Belmont,” it started, and it only got worse from there.

Weaving his eyes through the strata of well-meaning assaults on his persona, he would have argued every point on the list with the verve of a southern trial attorney, but for one final stiletto in his ego: “You don’t know how to take criticism,” it read.

Touché.

“Fuck.”

He let his gaze wander to the last paragraph. He read it, as though it hadn’t been read to him just minutes before.

“Bel, I know your life isn’t great right now, but neither is anyone else’s. You can feel sorry for yourself all you want—it’s your prerogative—but I can’t deal with your projected misery anymore. I have my own shit I’m dealing with.”

“You hold me down.”

She put that last line all by itself on the page. Who needs exclamation marks when you can throw haymakers in four words or less?

“Fuck.”

Bel had gotten Dear John letters in the past, but not from long-term partners. He contemplated the planning and thought that had to go into the document. Two years together. How long had she been sitting on all of this? How many signs had she given him? He couldn’t remember any, which meant he probably missed every single one.

The birds outside of Belmont’s third-floor walkup coalesced into a shadow over his window, throwing his apartment into momentary twilight. The sudden and sharp change in his environment was enough to snap him out of his funk. He leaned forward, bringing his head back slowly this time.

Across the room, the dark screen of the TV shot back a reflection of himself in the moment, and he winced. Pudgy and out of shape were valid descriptions, and the disheveled mop of overgrown-but-thinning dull brown hair did nothing to ease the feeling of self-loathing that had become the leitmotif of his life. The pièce de résistance, though, was the shaggy Portland-beard he grew when he lost his last job. It was looking distinctively destitute, and it made him realise just how long he’d been unemployed. He did some mental math and counted the months backwards.

“Six months.”

He forced himself to say the number. That was how long. He’d been let go from his long-term restaurant management gig a little over six months ago. Any other time, it would have been a traumatic blow for him, calling into question his own self-worth and value as a member of the working class. But later that same week, his mother died suddenly of an upper respiratory infection. A month later, his father passed from undiagnosed colon cancer. Between losing his job and then both of his parents, it was a three hit combo that blindsided him, knocking the wind from his sails and the pallor from his complexion. In the six months since, he’d never tried to get himself back together.

Throughout his entire life, he’d never remembered them going to the doctor for any sort of yearly check ups. He didn’t think they were anti-vax or anything, but there was the mentality that God would protect them from whatever may come, and that if he wanted to take them home, it was part of his plan.

“Fucking bullshit.”

It put their age into perspective and made him think about his own. In his mid-thirties now, and nothing to really show for it. His parents had owned a small insurance company in his tiny hometown of Brooksville, Florida, but they’d sold it several years ago and retired early. They’d never told Belmont the number, but based on the inheritance, they’d raked in several million. The bulk of the money was donated to their church, leaving Belmont and his sister to split the rest, though in what Belmont assumed was a final fuck you for moving across the country, his parents had left his sister 75% of the remainder, with a line about their grandchildren’s college fund.

His sister didn’t have any kids.

The executor made a comment to Belmont that it was within his legal rights to contest the will if he felt it was unfairly divided, but Bel didn’t want to kick the hornet’s nest. He took the quarter million that he’d been given, set aside the taxes for it, and went back to Portland. His sister and he hadn’t spoken since. Bel had been living on the money for six months now, and he figured he could easily go a few years if need-be. He didn’t want need to be though.

While he reminisced, Bel felt the ground vibrate under his feet and instinctively looked at his phone, assuming it to be the cause, but the screen was dark and no new alerts blazed across the OLED void. After another few seconds of trembling, he understood the root cause. It was an earthquake, and the third in as many days.

When he’d left Florida for the west coast, he had a sort of perverse romanticism with the idea of being caught in an earthquake. There was an Indiana Jones feeling about the whole thing. It was adventurous, dangerous, and not at all as shitty as the hurricanes of his home state. When a tropical storm rolled through, there wasn’t much that you could do. Maybe throw some sandbags down, get some water and canned goods from the grocery store, make sure the generator was topped off with diesel, and if you were lucky, all the Bud Light wouldn’t have been bought out yet so you’d grab a rack or two of them for each member of the household.

Earthquakes were different, though. Earthquakes didn’t come from miles off the coast with a week of warning. Earthquakes meant thinking on your feet and acting on a plan. Earthquakes were what separated the leaders from the followers, the men from the boys, or something. Earthquakes created opportunities to be a hero to your neighbors as you lift a ceiling beam off of their trapped family dog. Earthquakes were… really none of that, as Belmont was quickly learning.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

In reality, earthquakes were just another terrible thing that hurt more the less you had. Have a mansion on the west side in the hills? Earthquakes were an inconvenience at most. Living in a house that hasn’t passed fire code since the Eisenhower administration? Well, here’s hoping you aren’t too attached to what little else you have.

In the twelve years since he’d moved to the west coast, Bel had never felt an earthquake happen. It was always one of those things that people spoke of after the fact, typically asking if you even felt it, which no one did. For most people, it was just a Big Foot story—something a neighbor’s friend’s college roommate swears he experienced one time. Bel guessed down in California they were probably worse, but in the Pacific Northwest, they were pretty understated. In the last few days, though, Bel had definitely felt them, and this one was no different.

The subtle vibrations under his feet gave way to audible rumblings, and he was suddenly reminded of being in one of those vibrating chairs in the mall. The ones where you can pay $10 to have your butt shook while drinking your Orange Julius, so the person who dragged you to the mall can do their shopping.

To his left, a book abruptly fell from the IKEA shelf, haphazardly attached to his wall, and snatched him from his daydream. The clatter of it made Bel jump, and he let out a controlled breath. The rumbling wasn’t stopping. Had the last ones gone on this long? Was this The Big One? He panicked, thinking about what he was supposed to do. The lights flickered, and the power waned, then came back, and then finally cut off completely, leaving him with only the sounds of the earth shaking and his own heartbeat. He didn’t have a school desk to cower under. Or was that just for nuclear bombs? Searching his memory for after-school specials or teen dramas that may hold the answer for him, he came up woefully underserved. Bel thought he remembered an episode of Saved By The Bell where Zack had helped Mr. Belding’s wife give birth in an elevator during an earthquake, or something like that. The memory dragged Bel out of his panic and he smirked at the thought of a 15-year-old boy turned midwife. He remembered the mother and child had survived, but the 15-year-old’s psyche had probably not so much. Either way, it would not help him now.

Then it was over. The rumbling stopped, and the apartment returned to silence, but the power hadn’t cut back on yet. Bel walked over to the book and picked it up off the floor. It was a copy of Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, a gift from the woman that had just walked out of his life.

“Fuck.”

He placed the paperback back on the shelf and put a hand on the wall. Bel looked over to the 75 gallon glass tank a few feet away. In it, somewhere, was a 5 foot long silver and white ball python named Mephisto, and he was Bel’s best friend.

“Hey, bud, are you OK in there?”

There was no response from the snake, who had taken up residence in one of his two hides, likely in response to the earthquake.

Bel had bought Mephisto shortly after moving to Portland. He’d gone into the pet store with no actual plan on getting a pet, but really just to look around and maybe play with a rabbit or something. Looking back, it had been because he was lonely in Portland, having just moved from his small hometown a few months earlier. He didn’t have any close friends, and no significant other. He was looking for companionship, even if he didn’t admit it to himself. When a salesman named Brian had asked him what he was looking for, Bel had said that he was just browsing, but then he saw the snake display. He pointed to them, and the man happily showed him the various reptiles in stock. Among the lizards, frogs, and iguanas, there were several small snakes, but the one that stuck out was Mephisto, though the sign on the cage had his name as “Axl.” Bel hated Guns ‘N Roses, and he asked if he could change the name. The salesman had shrugged and said he didn’t think that snakes really cared what their name was, so Bel went with Mephisto from the play Faust. And just like that, he had decided he was going to be the snake guy. Bel laughed when he thought about it. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who has a snake. They were the mythical snake guy. No one was ever actually the snake guy, though. Bel figured there were worse kinds of guys to be.

So, $600 and a bootleg DVD of So You Bought a Snake, Now What? later, Bel and Meph were partners. The snake itself had only cost $200, but Bel didn’t want to cheap out on the accoutrement, so he let Brian talk him into just about everything that could be shoved into a 75 gallon fish tank. The DVD had called it enrichment, but Bell thought about it more like setting up a battle map for a game of D&D. He was strategic with it—creating various ecological zones and ensuring there was significant biodiversity in all the plastic plants—and when he was done, he’d actually felt happy for the first time since his move. Though it took some time for Mephisto to warm up to him, Bel took his time, and by the winter of that year, he couldn’t have imagined ever having another pet.

Slowly, Mephisto moved from his hide on top of an unpowered heating pad, and flicked his tongue around, tasting the air. Bel unlatched the top of the vivarium and slid it back, granting his arm access. Meph knew what that meant, and he raised his body towards Bel’s hand. Bel slid his hand under the snake and let him crawl upwards.

“Good boy. You want to go for a walk?”

Meph flitted his tongue.

Bel strolled around the apartment, looking over everything and making sure nothing else had fallen or broken. Meph slid up his arm and up to Bel’s neck, checking the air along the way. Once he found purchase on Bel’s shoulder, he relaxed and stopped moving.

From overhead, an airplane screamed across the sky, way too low for Bel’s tastes. His apartment was near the airport, and sometimes the planes came in a lot lower than Bel thought was safe. This one, though, seemed to have just barely missed the roof. Bel looked out of the window as it passed and saw that it was still well above the buildings, and he was likely exaggerating it himself because of the stress of the morning.

Bel looked up and down the parking lot, half hoping to see a blue Accord, half praying it wasn’t there. It wasn’t, and he gave a long sigh as Meph bumped his nose against the glass.

Her name was Monica, and he’d been trying his best not to say the name to himself, maybe believing that there was some power in the repression, but it wasn’t working. Looking out of the window like this reminded him of the first time she’d come over to his place. He’d been so excited that he stared out of the window with his face pressed to the summer glass like a kid waiting for the ice cream truck to come down the street. What he hadn’t known is that she’d taken her car in for an airbag recall, and the dealership had given her a loaner for the night. It was still an Accord, but it was red instead of blue. He hadn’t even known she’d parked until she was stepping out of the car, and by then it had been too late. She’d seen him with his forehead smudging the glass, and she laughed at him from the parking lot. He’d been so embarrassed then, but he laughed when he thought about it now, like she’d laughed when she saw him. She used to laugh like that a lot when they’d first been together. Maybe if he’d realized she hadn’t been laughing so much, he could have done something about it.

Too late, Bel. It’s too late now.

Across the parking lot, on the sidewalk that lined Sandy Boulevard, an old man stood staring up at the sky, searching across the clouds like he expected to catch a pop-fly at any moment. Bel had never seen him before, and he let out a short laugh at the cloud watcher. He was wearing a tweed jacket, complete with elbow patches, and a pair of matching slacks. His shoes were a stark contrast, though. They were brightly colored Adidas runners, and they looked like he had been standing in pink highlighter fluid. On top of his head, covering wild gray hair, was a baseball cap, and sporadic glints of shiny metal glistened on his fingers as they adjusted it against the harsh pre-noon sun. Bel thought that the old man looked like Costco Indiana Jones. The man’s head swiveled quickly towards Bel, and for a moment their eyes locked, but the man just looked off, back into the sky, as though he didn’t see Bel in the window looking down at him.

Bel snorted. “If there is an eclipse right now, it’s gonna blow that dude’s mind.”

He rubbed Meph’s chin with the knuckle of his pointer finger and turned back into the apartment away from the window. “Come on, let’s get you back in your cage and I’ll go get dressed like a respectable, unemployed line cook.”

Meph flitted his tongue.

Bel lowered the snake back into the vivarium and reseated the lid with a click. Meph slithered around his abode slowly, making sure nothing had changed since he left.

Bel walked to the bedroom door and turned back to Meph.

“I think I’m gonna head down to the Plaid Pantry after I get dressed. You want anything?”

The snake didn’t respond.

“Oh, you want me to stop talking to a snake?”

Again, no response.

“You think that this is the beginning of a mental break?”

Nothing.

“I shouldn’t meta-analyze my mental health, and I should probably find a therapist that doesn’t work for frozen mice?”

Meph slid into one of the hides inside of his enclosure.

“Thanks, Dr. Mephisto. Should I leave the check with the receptionist?”