In/just/

Shep wakes up one morning and the world has ended. Not some personal life altering event that shattered his world--the whole world has legitimately ended. His mother isn’t there like she normally is to make him breakfast so he grabbed his teddy bear and set about to do it himself. He drops his milk, spilling it across the floor like a pale tsunami rolling into the corners by the dishwasher and pooling beneath the sink. He decides to eat his cereal dry (which his mother never let him do--but she wasn’t there now was she?), proceeds to play in the spilt milk because it looked like fun and no one was around to tell him not to. With every splish against his palm he expected his mother to pop around the corner and scold him but she did not, the house still and empty in the morning hours.

Shep was somewhat of an angelic looking child. He had coarse thick dark hair with thick lashes that outlined his dark blue eyes. His mother had always said he was going to be a heartbreaker when he grew older (just like his father she would add to her friends, thinking he couldn’t hear her). He wasn't sure what a heartbreaker was but he figured it must be a good thing because she always seemed a little proud whenever she said it, giving him a little stroke on the head or an endearing smile. He took to calling himself a heartbreaker on the playground and explaining to everyone that he would become one later in life. No one else knew what it meant either. Shep wonders if his mother would ever turn up and explain it to him when he got older or if, because she wasn’t here, his destiny would never be fulfilled. He would always remain Little Shep, covered in drying milk with his worn through teddy bear clutched in his small hand.

The house becomes boring so he ventures outside, hoping to run into some life--preferably his mother but at this point he would take his elusive father too. The streets remain abandoned no matter how far he wanders, his teddy bear starting to droop and drag along the ground as his arm tires from searching. A single crow caws over a crumpled burger wrapper with splotchy ketchup stains. It takes towards the sky when approached by an orange tomcat, who slinks off when it spots Shep trundling down the road.

Shep sees the gold glint first, a hint of red stone in the harshening light against the pale sidewalk. He jogs up to the necklace, his bear bopping behind him and stops just short of its yellow chain. He recognizes it, the heart shaped locked his mother always wears, gold colored and adorned with what looks like a ruby but he knows is fake because he overheard his mother telling a friend that. In the entirety of his, admittedly short, life he has never seen the locket off his mother’s neck and its presence on the ground without her scares Shep more than waking up to silence and an empty world.

Everything is too quiet. Normally their block is filled with the bustle of working people going to and from their jobs, a constant murmur of children and corner gossip. As Shep meanders towards where he thinks his mother works, the lack of sound reverberates around him and turns his fear into a quickening panic. An ugly thought burbles, the realization that something may have happened to his mother, something bad and looking for her may be fruitless.

After some time of aimless walking, he hears his first noise. Tinkling noise, like delicate bells on a push cart that remind him of the ice cream man who comes through his neighborhood sometimes. Initially he’s excited at the prospect of human contact in this apparently empty world, especially contact with the ice cream man, but the tones of the chimes that stops him short. At first a happy sound, the longer he listens the more he hears a dark undertone. Something melancholy and rotten beneath the surface. He thinks of the time his mother discovered rot underneath the wallpaper in his room, wet sickness under a facade of bright color. Unease and dread begin to replace the small spark of hope the bells had, briefly, ignited. Shep stands still and waits as the clanging becomes closer and closer to him. He knows he should run but the rhythmic clang has him rooted, almost hypnotized and his feet do not move.

From around the corner emerges a man pushing a cart that dings and chimes with each step. But he was not a man completely, for Shep saw his feet were cloven and resembled that of a goat rather than the toes of a human. And in that moment his fear was deep and wide as the creature stretches closer, the clip clop of his hooves become more pronounced as the blocks between them shorten. The goat man smiles as he comes upon the little boy. Nods to the heart-shaped box around his neck.

“You miss your mother, don’tcha?” The goat man’s smile becomes a leer.

Shep nods and looks down, his teddy bear quivers in his shaking hand.

“She’s safe here in my cart, don’t worry,” the goat man pats his bell laden carrier and that is when Shep notices what fills the cart--baubles and glass balls in so many colors and sizes, each glinting against the sun with dizzying array.

“She’s in one of those?” Shep finds his voice and the goat man laughs, delighted.

“Of course she is. You would be too but I have special plans for you.”

“I don’t want to be part of your special plans,” Shep pouts.

“You don’t have much choice now, do ya?” The goat man considers Shep’s tiny frame before adding, “you don’t know who your father is, do you?”

Shep vigorously shakes his head, brings his teddy bear to his chest to wrap his arms around its plush frame. The cereal from earlier is chaotic in his stomach from nerves, a desire to vomit sudden and almost uncontainable.

“I want to see my mother--which one is she-- which bauble?” Shep says into the neck of his bear, ‘I won’t go anywhere with you until I see her.”

“Well let’s see--hm--yes,” the goat man rustles through the cart, the glass clanking together as he pushes through them, “oh right, here it is. Yes, look.”

The goat man offers the ball to Shep, keep a firm grasp as he allows him to look. Yes, his mother is in the ball and she doesn’t look too happy about it. There’s a lot of smoke swirling around too but he catches glimpses of her pouting or crying, a moment where she screams into the purple smog. A sudden need comes over Shep at seeing his mother this morose, and before the goat man can take her away he finds himself bringing his hand down onto it. His palm slaps against the top and the momentum pushes it right through the goat man’s fingers and out of his grasp. The goat man screams in horror as the glass rockets towards the cement.

“No! You can’t --”

The bauble hits the ground, explodes in a smattering of glass, the goat man wails, and all Shep sees is light, bursting form the bust bauble, hurtling towards the darkened sky.