by Lundy Burge
why.
In disgust, she found her eyes leering toward the night sky blood bath. Now in addition to the lights and sparks darting every which way, smoke dragons curled across the on the roof of the dome like undead vines, dead and dying but still going.
She stared, enthralled, at the smoke trails. She found an odd degree of comfort in them. To her, the smoke wasn’t part of the Roman candles or rockets or whistlers, it was just there as a bystander. She watched it twirl and dance over her head until it quietly faded away, not dead, just gone for a while. Then she noticed something behind the smoke curls, and her heart started pounding harder than the fireworks could ever make it.
The sky is moving.
The few stars she could see were shaking, not twinkling, not swaying side to side slightly like an optical illusion, but shaking like they were dice in a gambler’s hand. The entire sky seemed to be quivering in fear, or maybe shuddering in pain. Riley thought of an earthquake...but shouldn’t those happen on the ground?
Without thinking, Riley’s plate-wide eyes darted to the fireworks screaming and bellowing in the distance. They were as bright and as loud and as rapid as ever. It was a supernova going off in all the colors of the rainbow to celebrate glorious Independence Day. The vibrations were so strong now that Riley was shaken in her chair. If the vibrations were so strong this far away, what would they be like up there?
Horrified, Riley looked at Joann. She was entranced, like all the others would be and should be. Her face became a canvas for all the light splashing upon her. Red, blue, green, yellow, and purple all flew across her face and into her wide, gaping mouth.
Riley grabbed her arm and yanked it towards her. Joann yanked her arm back and mouthed the word, “What?” irritated.
“Joann, Joann!” Riley said, “The sky! It’s—“
Joann just kept shaking her head and mouthing, “What?” over and over again. Riley suddenly realized that Joann wasn’t mouthing anything, she was talking. Her voice was eliminated by the noise of the sky bombs. What’s worse, Riley’s voice was gone, too.
“The sky!” Riley yelled desperately, “It’s moving!”
Joann shook her head like she was trying to understand a heavy foreign accent.
Riley looked up at the sky again. It was now shaking like an angry maraca.
As a reaction, without thinking, she stood up in her chair. Maybe she could get someone’s attention or yell loud enough and get someone to look up. It just had to work.
“Everyone!” Riley screamed at the top of her lungs. Her arms were waving madly towards the quaking sky. “Ev—“
That was when the fireworks broke the sky, and it ripped open.
There was no sound, at least none that could be heard above the fireworks. The sky just slid open like two pieces of paper sliding off of one another. Riley couldn’t react, just stare at what was behind the sky, all of the swirling, dazzling paint globs, for the half of a second before they fell.
It all came drizzling down, a torrent from a rusted pipe broken. Sparks of red, blue, and purple, meteors of yellow, green, orange, and fuchsia, and midnight comets of black burning material that could only be seen by the heat radiating from them. What the firework’s debris had been, this was their potential that Riley had always known they had: ten thousand tons of Hell confetti raining down upon you, so loud you couldn’t even have the luxury of hearing yourself scream.
Only this made no sound. The people could clearly hear themselves and those around them screaming as they took flight.
Riley ran. She didn’t think, couldn’t think. There was too much adrenaline in her brain for her to be a complete person anymore, only a beast clawing for survival.
Still, she found herself glancing at the chaos surrounding her. There was a woman whose eyes were nearly popping out as her hands fumbled desperately to put out the hungry fire in her hair, the flames a shade of pumpkin. To her left was a man swatting at hot little multi-colored burs on his shirt. One man poured whatever fluid he could grab hold of on his friend, whose arm was now completely engulfed in a fire the color of a pine tree. For one person, it was already too late as he or she (it was impossible to tell, now) alternated between desperately running around like a mad rain dancer and rolling on the ground to put out the pink and red flames which had enveloped their clothes (Riley hoped it wasn’t there flesh). They kept coming, left and right. People burning, men screaming as they stared at the flames crawling all over them, women crying and scratching at the meteors that struck them, and was that a child...?
NO! That was the only word, throughout this entire ordeal, that entered her mind.
A shard of the volcanic black material grazed her arm. She didn’t feel it, but she just saw it. She could see the little blisters of the burn starting to appear. She grasped at it, not from pain, but as a habit. Then she noticed the little blue flames licking her other arm. She quickly swatted them out, not feeling the burns that formed on her hand by doing so. Without reason, she looked over her should and down her back.
The back of her jeans were on fire. A small trail of red and purple heat blazed up each leg. The bottom of her shirt was being gobbled up by fire, too.
Learned instinct caused her to fall to the ground and start to roll, but when she got on her back, she was struck by the sight of all the colors still up in the area beyond the sky melding and swirling together. Later, she would think it would have made a nice abstract painting. Pain began to bite at her burns, like little pin pricks, some meteors and sparks landed mere inches away from her, and she got up and started running again.
The pain grew worse, and was soon coupled by the pain of her legs and side cramping in protest of this frantic sprinting, but that only made her try to run faster, faster, because slowing would mean stopping, would mean collapsing from the pain and fatigue, would mean being unable to get back up, would mean death.
So she just kept running, faster and faster. Even when the sparks stopped falling, she kept running, faster and faster. Even when no screams could be heard but her own, she kept running, slower, but still as fast as she could. She kept running, even when she couldn’t spare the breath for a scream, until, at last, her foot slipped, and she fell onto gravel, not knowing nor caring why it was there. Her hands flung out to protect her, the rocks cut into the burns on her palms, and all of the pain, from the burns and everything else, exploded in her, like her very own fireworks show inside her, and all she could do was open her mouth and let the booms and whistles of those rockets and Roman candles and sparklers out in the form of a low, tired, desperate scream, with a few whimpering sobs as a finale.
From the hospital TV, Riley saw a tan, black-haired news woman describe the incident as just that, a “tragic incident.” No details of what fell from behind the sky, or that the sky was even opened, just that a terrible explosion had taken place that injured all of the spectators, killing fourteen of them, and killing all of the crew operating the show.
She herself had multiple third-degree burns, most of which were on the back of her calves. Those were the most severe; they nearly made her stay in the hospital over night.
She was one of the luckier ones. She was able to leave the ER in a matter of a few hours.
She didn’t ask about Joann. She thought she’d find out when she saw whether or not her chair was empty at the office.
On the drive home, she kept seeing images of the sparking comets raining down on her flash on and off inside her eyes. She tried not to blink for as long as possible because if she closed her eyes, the colors would be even more vivid, as if the sky had opened again and they were coming at her again, a thousand times as strong as before.
They won’t be able to trace the company. It won’t exist. Just won’t. It didn’t for my dad.
Another fact she thought she had forgotten. She didn’t notice.
For weeks afterward, she found herself staring up at the sky. She tried to tell herself that she didn’t expect anything, but that would fail when, every so often
, she’d think she saw a flash of red or green, or a star or the sun twitch slightly, like an aftershock or the last blare of thunder after the rain had stopped falling.
Birth of Pong
Near Miss
The Day After
