Story Idea: Impact (Rough Draft)

In time, things would be different, the emotional build-up which prevented us from understanding what was going on, it would all dissipate leaving us with a feeling of emptiness and glow of sadness and shock, kind of like a bathtub which had been drained.

In the meantime, we were left standing in a pile of rubble where the missile had entered and had exploded. We had been lucky, if you could call it that, lucky that the building had been constructed the way it had, so that where we were, we were protected generally from the blast.

Others had not been so lucky, victims of a despicable war, laying down while their souls waded through the dust formed in the air, choked, unable to leave this Earth as a result of the detritus cloud.

I looked at her, her eyes so wide, so vague, so unreadable, her pupils that same deep purple, the same color of space dust that you see in photographs of space, bright against a background of black, except in reverse, bright against a background of white. I wanted to crawl into those eyes, to see what she saw, because maybe she understood something about what we had witnessed that I didn’t know, something that would allow me to take the pieces of it, to reconfigure all of it into a different shape so that the incomprehensible became comprehensible, clear, developed, understood.

“What…” she begun, stopping short, not quite sure the question she was supposed to be asking. I couldn’t hear her though, the persistent ringing in the ears covering everything with a plainness, a kind reset, but not really, because once I regained my hearing, if I regained my hearing, this would all still be here, the echo of it at least.

I wetness like a bead of sweat dribbled down the side of my head. I reached up and felt it, pulled it away to inspect it and found a deep red staining my fingers. It was as if my guilt had poured out of my head, just a slight bit of it.

I felt awkward in that moment, through the fog of the event, a fallout of it all made things complicated. Was I supposed to approach her and hold her? Was that even appropriate? At the same time, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hold her even to touch her, to allow myself to be touched.

Grieving is a private thing, even when you are with others, because no one truly knows what you are going through. Grieving is a personal thing, like unpacking a suitcase, pulling out item after item of clothing, still with the scent of where you had been, but only faintly, only faintly, so that you can never fully recapture the full memory, only brief sensations of it, sad that the moments are over.

She held her hand out to her side, as if she were looking for someone to reach for it, to grab onto it, to guide her out of this mess of rubble, of bags of broken bones and bruised organs, of the sounds of dirt raining from above intermingled with the moans of the dying. I couldn’t find the strength to take it from her though, to protect her from the horrors of this. I wasn’t sure I wanted to protect her from it.

The round café table we had been seated at had been torn apart, the surface of it which moments before held our coffees, now separated from the base, strewn a few feet, in accordance to the flow of the blast. At the base, Gerald lay his arms hugging it as if gripping it with his hands would prevent him from slipping upward into death’s embrace. One of his eyes was closed, the other one, independently opened halfway, a kind of disjunction. A layer of dust covered his body and became thick and mud-like where he bled.

Others had survived the blast, too. Husbands knelt over wives, mothers knelt over children, holding the bodies in the arms, heads tilted, looking down at their loved one in reverence, holding them like a kind of offering, a silent supplication to the power greater than themselves, asking that they take the pain bound in the lifeless body away from them, take away the weight of the head, and the torso, and the legs.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, a uniformed soldier, a small but deadly firearm in hand, stood behind me. The soldier’s face was covered by a helmet which possessed a tinted visor preventing me from observing the face underneath. I imagine that the soldier was trying to tell me something, giving me instructions of some sort, not understanding the idiocy of trying to verbalize what he wanted me to do.

I shook my head, held my hand up to my ear, tried to state that I couldn’t hear anything. My voice hummed in my skull, a muffled noise. I wondered if I was talking too loud.

The soldiers removed one of his hands from the gun he held and pointed to a lighter part of the dust cloud which I suspect was an opening in the building. I grabbed Michelle around her forearm and began to pull her toward the light.

She resisted me…