Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Rapture

1.

That morning, I woke up to an empty bed. My parents, who slept on a mattress on the floor, were gone. My sister, who slept on the other side of the queen-sized bed we shared, was also missing. My mother’s Left Behind book lay face down by my feet. As I sat up, my stuffed Winnie the Pooh pillow fell to the floor. The room looked eerily tidy; even the frames of our family pictures were aligned. Living in the same space as my sister, my mother, and my father meant everything was shared, including cleanliness.

“And cleanliness,” my mother always said, “is next to godliness.”

I opened the bedroom door to see the sun pouring in through the window at the end of the hall, and thanked the Lord for its blinding beauty. In my grandparents’ house at the heart of the Philippine city of San Juan, everything was warm. Every surface was drenched in sunlight.

Barely awake, I made my way up four stories to the kitchen. For breakfast, Mamita always welcomed my stomach with rice, sunny-side-up eggs, and fried eggplants. We ate on the rooftop every day, our dining table next to the washing machine where we did our laundry, watching the morning news on TV while we dug into our food. But today was different. No one was in the kitchen. Silence fell on everything like dust. I went back down the stairs one step at a time, and dialed my mother’s office number on the telephone. Silence answered me.