HH_mirror

In the summer of 1999, very little surprised Claire Tourneur. She simply wouldn't let shock take away valuable time that could be spent partying away the fact that her life was going to end. Everyone's lives, actually. The nuclear satellite hung precariously over the earth, losing a battle with gravity that would end life on the planet when it finally succumbed. That was the theory, at least. Nobody was quite sure what would happen, but there was no point in taking chances. Faced with her own mortality, Claire had decided that if she couldn't beat the satellite to the punch, she was going to live the rest of her life in an unending fog.

The party she had just left was a one in a long string of interchangeable gatherings. She had woken up on a couch she couldn't remember falling asleep on. She'd picked up a champagne flute that certainly wasn't hers, grabbed shoes that possibly could be hers, and had stepped outside to leave in her stolen car. That was when the world had ended.

How else could she be in a cold castle, and not out in the drive? She was frozen, shocked into feeling her first strong emotion in months: fear. The fear didn't last long, though. The pills she had consumed the night before formed a protective chemical barrier against those bothersome feelings, and her pharmaceutical defenders were quick to come to her aide. So that was the end, she thought. I suppose that a warning would have been too much to ask for. French was her native tongue, but she was fluent in English and German, if the situation called for it.

If this was the end of the world, though, she had expected a bit more fanfare in the next life, or at least a bit more crowding. As it was, she was the only person in the room. There was one other object of note: a small wooden table with a sheath of papers and a pen. Or not a pen, really. Claire appreciated that. She would not enjoyed the afterlife very much if the celestial powers did not have a sense of flair. The paper had writing in English, so she answered in turn.

( I took the money/I spiked your drink/You miss too much these days if you stop to think )