The Eye of a Needle

by Nikki Little

It is by a most curious happening that I find myself here. Perhaps I should start at the beginning. I was a small restaurant owner and was quite successful. Oh, I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't really like that at all. I was not your typical slave driver that is so common in the restaurant industry. I ran a small, upscale cafe that catered to the business class -- people who could afford to pay high prices. I had extremely high food safety standards, and disposed of everything past its expiration date. I paid my employees well -- a living wage in an industry marked by minimum wage and high turnover. I wasted nothing. Instead of throwing food about to expire into the dumpster, I cleaned out my walk-in of food about to expire every Sunday at around 10:00 P.M and had my employees prepare it. Every Sunday one of them, or me, took the prepared food to the local homeless shelter which, I'm sure you know, was absurdly overcrowded because our economy had simply ceased to function for ordinary people. It was at one of my trips to that local homeless shelter that I first met him. Tall with a long, white beard and a majestic bearing that seemed incongruous in a homeless shelter. He was obviously well-educated and sounded like a philosopher on those few occasions that I spoke to him. His message to me at every meeting was the same: "A day of reckoning is coming. People like these, the last of the earth, shall be first. The privileged, who are used to standing in line for nothing, shall be last in everything. Always be kind to the nobodies, for you never know who is watching." He seemed to take a liking to me, and gave me repeated warnings that "you can't buy your way into heaven." I thought he was just another religious fanatic, and politely endured his ravings.

On my last trip to the homeless shelter to give away food that was about to expire, he warned me, "The day has come. Tomorrow morn there will much rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth. The wicked will reap the fruits of their self-absorption." The next day was just as he said. All the wretched of the earth -- the entire planet -- and the many of the struggling middle class who were just able to maintain their dignity -- were gone. The streets were eerily empty as I walked toward the front door of my restaurant. I found none of my employees in the kitchen getting things ready to open the doors in one hour. Because of the eerie quiet in the streets, I was not particularly upset as I hung a sign on the front door of my business "Temporarily closed. Please come again soon." I discovered a gathering a people on the front lawn of the town's courthouse and joined them. They were mostly business people and professionals. They all reported the same thing as I had experienced. None of their employees had shown up. In fact, no one's employees could be found anywhere. The town's mayor was standing at the top of the courthouse steps and shouted for everyone's attention. He informed us that only a handful of the town's utility employees were still around, and that the work that used to be done by ordinary people would have to be done by us. A long time ago, I had taken training in water and wastewater treatment plant operation and told the utilities manager that I would be glad to help out in the town's treatment plants as best I could. I was the only person that day who volunteered to do that work that makes our technology-dependent lives work. The rest of the business people and professionals thought that they were above such work.

It didn't take long for the economy as we all had once known it to simply disappear. The rebellion started with the farmers who refused to accept government currency in return for food. It wasn't long before government currency became irrelevant. There were so few people left that we simply broke open the doors of abandoned shops and took what we needed. There were no law enforcement officers of any type. The jails were empty. There were only judges -- who had no one to judge, and lawyers who had no one to defend -- or gouge. It didn't take long for electricity to fail in many parts of the town as the few utility supervisors struggled to maintain any service at all. I helped out at the town's treatment plants, and with the help of the supervisor, we put the town's ancient slow-sand filters back into use because our supply of chemicals that is used in the normal, highly technical water treatment systems was running out. We bypassed all the complicated technical wastewater treatments and ran what little wastewater was coming in to the town's old wastewater ponds. The town's supply of electricity was sharply curtailed and limited to the downtown area. We found local sources of coal and burned that instead of trucked-in oil. Everything became local in nature and we had to learn to be self-sufficient. The television stations, the radio stations, the newspapers, the telephones, the cell phones, the internet,...all went silent as people abandoned those things that had once seemed so important for the more mundane matters of simply feeding themselves and finding water. Cash blew in the streets like old newspapers. My old cafe became a sort of communal kitchen. Everywhere you looked, life seemed to revert to the patterns of the 1800s.

Our favorite pastime became speculating on what had happened. Some claimed it was "The Rapture." However, that phenomenon was supposed to be the departure of only the righteous. What had actually happened was the departure of all the non-privileged. Murderers, child rapists, career criminals had all disappeared. I posited the theory that we were being tested. Having spent our entire lives in the pursuit of an abstraction that now had no value at all, we had to learn to be useful. We had to learn to take care of each other. My fellow business owners of the Chamber of Commerce crowd scoffed at my naiveté. "Women in business! Too soft-hearted to ever be anything but small-time!" It did no good to point out that the world appeared to have little use now for the profit motive.

One evening I walked over to the now-empty homeless shelter and wondered at the irony: the homeless would have no trouble now finding a place to live. Locks had become irrelevant. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow in the shelter's make-shift cafeteria. It was my old acquaintance at the homeless shelter, the majestic fellow that I had nicknamed "Plato." I asked him why it was that he seemed to be the only poor person who hadn't disappeared. "I am back for a second gathering of souls," he said. "I have played many roles in your history. I was Moses in the times of the Old Testament. I was Spartacus in the days of the Roman Empire. I was Gandhi in India. I was John Brown in the days before your Civil War. I was Salvador Allende in Chile. I have grown weary of fighting the same battles over and over again. Most people seem to be unable to learn the most basic lesson of life -- one that should be learned as a small child: share your toys. That's it. That's all people had to do. It's time to tear everything down and start again. The little people have already been judged. The privileged of the world, such as yourself, were given a chance to prove their basic humanity in a test of their character. In a world where all the old rules had been swept away, could people learn to work together and share their abilities and possessions for betterment of all? When you volunteered to work in the town's treatment plants and opened your old restaurant as a communal kitchen, you saved your own soul. You became useful to someone other than yourself. Miracles do happen, it seems. Come. It is time to leave. One-by-one, I and other souls like me are scavenging the world for the salvageable. Those who passed the test will join the others in their eternity. Those who failed, which is most, will be left with no one at all to do any work for them. They will work or they will die of thirst, hunger, or exposure -- whichever comes first."

He pointed to a shimmering mirage on the wall of the homeless shelter and beckoned me. I asked for a moment and am now banging away on an old manual typewriter. I feel the need to leave some explanation behind. The mirage on the wall pulsates and looks like a mountain range. At the center I see a spire which looks like the eye of a needle.

The End

This story is completely original, and is entirely mine. --Nikki Little