A prompt/writing entry a day |
Crowds. Hordes. Like bridges, there's no place to run when disaster strikes. Mob running, traction on bodies. Instinctual urge to flee obliterates decency, manners. Individual panic supersedes all else. Small theater, claustrophobic nightmare. Brilliant flash burns eyes to blindness. Balcony partially collapses, crushing, encapsulating within the narrow seats. The keening, reverberates a lifetime later. Immense pressure squeezing air from dust-choked lungs. Something warm slid along the floor. I was so cold. Another, smaller explosion, muffled by debris, bodies. Velvet seats steel hard, sharp with protruding shards of fractured bone, wood, piercing screams. I thought sixteen was too young to die. Stranger with impossibly white-blond hair, the perfect features, the wide, wide Kerry green eyes was shorter than I, couldn't see over, around the man in front of her. In the dark, smoky ruins I could see her staring blankly at me. We'd switched seats. Crowds. Hordes. Like tunnels, there's no place to run when disaster strikes. Mob running, traction on bodies. Instinctual urge to flee obliterates decency, manners. Individual panic supersedes all else. My narrow viewpoint expanded after what happened in Boston. TV video evaporated air from room, I couldn't move, couldn't breathe a thousand mile away. All I could think was my brother's name. He was always there. Crowds never bothered him. On the phone, after, he didn't talk about the bombing, the lock-downs, the terrorists. He spoke of a hundred different kindnesses. Words, actions, hugs. A coming together. Boston, he said, felt even more small town than it usually did. I still avoid huge crowds, if I can. The press of bodies turns me into frozen ice that bends not; only shatters: shards from long ago still reverberate, pinning me to outer edges. There is air at the edges. A chance of escape. 295 words |