Pastey Soled Lola (the end)

Officer Casey knocked, and knocked again before giving the OK to his partners to break down the door. Her wooden door, the one whose stain had faded and knots had began to wiggle their way free, the one that she loved was split right down the middle, kicked and then folded in on itself, falling to the floor inside. A cloud of dust rose and then fell, settling over a sea of magazine scraps. The legs of the tables were gone, the bar stools no longer stood tall, and the steps to her bed lay tattered and used. The 3 officers stepped inside, sinking as they came further into the sea of scraps. One made his way over to the blinds that had been closed for weeks now according to the neighbors. He twisted the plastic rod and as he did, illuminated the true immensity of the scraps revealing a confusingly breathtaking entity. It took a moment, but the 3 officers soon saw that the scraps weren't just trash, they were laid in place very deliberately. Thin layers by the door, rippled back and forth until reaching an area in the center of the living room where their depth became greater. Just beyond this point was the first rise. A wave formed and curled, stopping just before the point of crumbling back down into the calmer parts of the sea. Beyond the first wave was another, and another and soon the officers saw it was a set of waves. 4 of them, the first three increasing in size and the last tapering off, rolling through the living room and spilling out to the front door. Officer Casey waded through the scraps into the bedroom. He called out "Lolaaa", but there was no answer. The floor of the bedroom was clean. You could see the carpet, and traces of life that once occupied the space. Lola's clothes lay there, her favorite sweaters hung in the closet and her sheets still lay, wrinkled up into balls at the foot of her bed. The steps were gone though, and the officers found it odd that her bed sat so high above the ground. It wasn't clear to them if her bed frame had always been decoupaged with thousands of smiling pictures of the same man, but they noted it in their report anyway. One final scan of the apartment revealed the most riveting thing of all. Pasted to the ceiling where thousands of eyes, layered thickly on top of each other, causing the mounds to bulge in asymmetrical patters from one end of the apartment to the other. Much like the scraps were hiding a sea, the eyeballs were disguising beautiful clouds of all different colors. Every blue eye had been grouped together and then dispersed in groups throughout. The browns were with the browns and the greens were with the greens and the black and white eyes had their groups too. Mounds and mound of eyes climbed down from the ceiling as stalactites would in an undisturbed cavern. The officers noted this as well. Officer Casey led his men out towards the exit. They stepped over the broken door and once beyond the frame turned to take one last look. The sea raged beneath rainbow stained clouds and the smiling faces of Lola's father could be seen drifting away.

The apartment door remained broken, washed up like driftwood in the sea of scraps. The winter had begun to creep inside the walls and interact with what Lola had left behind. The morning dew settled, dried and stained the windows, the dust flew into and irritated the eyes gazing at the water below, and the wind would intrude, fly around like a fly who can't find the window, and each time take with it pieces of Lola. At first the sea began to run dry, rising with the wind-influenced tide, but failing to retract. Pieces of the sea scattered through the hallways and stairwells and made their way out into the streets and into the drains. Each day, more and more would leave the apartment with the wind. Eventually the elements began to effect the ceiling as well. The moisture would weaken the bond of paste and eye and one by one the gazing sky fell, into the sea and was swept into the streets and down into the drains. Eventually, the sea was nothing more than a pastey salt flat, little bugs could now be seen racing across it. The rainbow stained sky had faded, and only the dirty, flat ceiling remained, mirroring the dimensionless plains below. Once the storm passed, the management company sent a cleaning crew in to empty the remainder of the apartment. Lola's clothes, her tea mug, Albert Einstein and her bed were all taken to the dump, and tossed to the top of the pile, leaving nothing but a flat, emotionless, empty apartment. A new door was installed and then closed and a lock box was placed around the knob, Lola was not home.

The rains came back, and this time they fell hard, flooding the streets, picking up the last pieces of trash from the roads and violently pushing them towards the sea. People stayed in doors, they didn't leave for fast food, or movies, and definitely didn't drive to the beach, they simply let the sand be beaten by the water drops as they sat indoors, consumed with themselves. Construction crews began sandbagging street corners and placing cement barricades, pushed up against the side of soggy mountains tempted to fall. Before dark, the last of the city's traffic had dissipated, finding holes to take cover in and all was silent, except for the drops of rain and the crashing waves. As the light lowered, the temperatures went with is and a crisp wind picked up, blowing south towards the beach, slicing through the city with little regard for anything wanting to hold it back, the wind had a destination and a purpose. Pushing along a mist of city rain, the wind raced through empty streets and didn't stop once hitting the sand. It rose, and then fell over the retaining walls and continued to fall until reaching the bottom of the storm drain. At the bottom sat the sea of scraps, the thousands of eyes and the smiling faces of a man of whom only Lola could identify. Pausing only for a moment to take hold of these object the wind whisked them up and with more force than ever, forged through the drain and burst back out into the sand. Pieces of Lola's life swirled above the seaside bringing with it feelings of anxiety and urgency and confrontation. If there were any onlookers, they would have sensed irradict change on the brink of taking shape, but would have been clueless as to what to look for or why. Only the wind knew and so it blew towards the reason. At the end of the beach, where the cliffs protruded into the sea, perched on top of a shipwrecked wooden row boat in a bright red coat sat Lola. She felt the wind come near, and she knew the reason it came. She stood up, turned her back to the ocean and watched as the wind formed the sea of scraps into a tsunami-sized wave. At the swells crest faces of Lola's father flurried about and comforted her before the end. Behind her the sky grew dark and the sea began to rumble, sending sets of waves crashing on top of one another, pushing the salty sea closer and closer to her pastey soles. Alone, Lola smiled, knowing she'd soon see the edge of the sea and accept simplicity as Sam had accepted it many years ago. Lola closed her eyes and took one last breath as the scraps and the sea collided, rising high above the earth in the shape of an A and rapidly retreated leaving nothing behind but the dimensionless wet sand.

The earth fell silent, as it sits in silence after an earthquake, and the only movement came from an exhausted sea. As the waves rolled in, and then pulled back out, layers of Lola were pushed deeper into the earth giving necessary and emotional depth to her final collage, connecting her with the earth in the way she theorized all of us needed to be connected with one another. Even though infected by the third dimension in her final days, Lola maintained that no matter how far people remove themselves from one another and no matter how convincing selfishness seems, we need to fight the desire to become linear, we need to not float away from the connectivity of dimensions as her father had, but instead work at reconnecting them in a way complimentary to more than just physical depth. Our dimension needs to be internal, it needs to float through the air and inspire. We need to be layered, we need to feel people and emotions on top of us and beneath us and on every side of us and it will only be through a completed collage that the bigger picture will be revealed.