Pompeii

An ambiguous figure replays the end of his days living in the beautiful city of Pompeii, just as the Vesuvius eruption destroys his world.

    It had been a relatively normal morning. Vendors called out to passersby, trying desperately to make some change to spend on liquor. Someone was carving a message into the back of a house. I could only think about the trouble he would get into later- if he was caught.

    I scanned the words in his carving, then decided it was too vulgar to make a note of.

    The day’s events were then cut short by a loud thud. The ground shook beneath our feet. The usual chatter quickly became frightened screams.

    In the distance, we could see smoke rising from the mouth of Mount Vesuvius.

    There wasn’t time for a full evacuation. The ground began to shake more violently. The tremors wouldn’t subside, and people took to the streets, holding children or precious items. Women, some carrying those not yet born, chatted among themselves, questioning the tremor and its source.

    My eyes were trained on the volcano looming on the horizon. Finally, the tremors seemed to slow. Everyone cheered, thinking we’d escaped a grave fate.

    It was then that fire spewed out of the volcano.

    Saying it was fire would be inaccurate. In reality, it was molten lava. But the mind-numbing panic I was experiencing wouldn’t allow me to process that fact. To me, it was the very fire found in the depths of Hell.

    The earthquake returned full force. My immediate reaction was to run- as fast and hard as possible, to a place far, far away. My second thought was to run back home and make sure my roommate understood the predicament. I pushed through the crowd of gaping onlookers, running to the home we rented. He wasn’t there.

    I brushed my dark hair out of my eyes. Where could he be? He hadn’t been due for work for hours. Did he run off looking for me? Or did he turn and flee with his metaphorical tail between his legs?

    There wasn’t much time to ponder this, though, as rock began to rain down on the city. The stones, most of them probably over a meter in diameter, were still still glowing red from the heat of their place of origin, Mount Vesuvius.

    At this point, my entire body was shaking. We were all going to die. It was all I could do to force myself to leap out of the way of a falling rock.

    One might say it was raining Earth. That Gaea, in her half-awake state, was beginning to take her revenge on the gods, starting with here, Pompeii.

    The pressure in the air was rising at an alarming rate, but in my panicked state, I didn’t notice it until it was enough to almost knock me out. I stumbled. People rushed around me, running away as fast as they could.

    They wouldn’t make it. We wouldn’t make it. For once the earth revolts, you can’t stop it.

    One person was on his knees, screaming a prayer to Jupiter, Neptune, Vulcan, Mars- any god that could possibly save us. A child leaned against the wall, gripping her head, pulling at her mother’s dress to get them moving.

    Whistling. Crash. Blood everywhere. It stained the stone buildings like dark red paint. Where the child and her nearly dead mother had stood was little more than a huge rock and blood.

    The sky was gray, ashen, grieving. If only he would cry and quench Vesuvius, named for being unquenchable.

    The praying man slumped to the ground, the air pressure too much for him. My legs refused to move, eyes refused to blink, lungs refused to breathe the air poisoned by death and acrid smoke.

    The blood stained my clothes, drying quickly in the extreme heat. Not ten meters away, rolls of lava slithered through the streets. It glowed red as it advanced, mocking me, leisurely strolling across the road.

    Rocks still rained from the sky. How I hadn’t yet been hit, smashed to a bloody pulp, was beyond me.

    Someone ran by, shoving me into someone else. Both of us toppled to the ground. It was quickly heating up, I noticed, as the lava approached.

    All around me, people fell to the ground, dead from inability to breathe the smoke clouding the air.

    The lava was close. A rock whizzed by my ear, smashing into the stomach of the person who fell down alongside me.

    I then made the worst decision I’d ever made. Bodies littered the street, with only a few stragglers, who dashed around, forgetting all sense of direction. The lava was looming above me; I knew no matter how much or how fast I ran, I could never outrun this quantity. I lurched to my feet and dove into a nearby house.

    Glass littered the floor of the house. The windows were smashed in, and it was small. A ladder led up to the roof, but the middle section had been ripped off and thrown to the side. In other words, I could not have chosen a worse house to hide in.

    There was a huge hole in the roof. A rock sat in the center of the room, on top of a table. The legs of the table had flown in different directions when the rock made impact, and the table itself was practically in splinters. There was a single chair, which had fallen over, in the corner.

    From the hole in the roof, lava dripped down onto the rock. It poured down from the open-air windows. The temperature in the small house rose immeasurably.

    Sweat trailed down my cheek. My terrified eyes searched for an exit- any exit.

    It was perfectly clear: this was where I’d die. Cornered, abandoned, trapped. The urge to close my eyes and succumb to the exhaustion of being terrified and hardly able to breathe was near impossible to resist, but I didn’t know if I could just fall to the ground circumstances like this.

    No one was left to save me, and even if they had the chance, they wouldn’t. I whispered a prayer to no god in particular as the heat became too much for me to bear, the exhaustion too heavy, the abnormal air pressure making my head pound. I blacked out with one last thought:

    Save me.

   

    In life, my name was Gaius. It means, “to rejoice.” But I have wandered these streets for millennia, and I’ve never found anything worth rejoice.

    Set me free.