Sidewalk

Walking down the crowded street with my head lowered, staring at the sidewalk, ignoring everything else around me.  The sound coming out of my headphones pervades my entire awareness, even the multitudes of people surrounding me, shoving and briskly passing me, were of no consequence.  I thought of nothing but my two legs, one in front of the other.  Explosion, bright and hot to my left, eyes wide my headphones are knocked off my head.  I am flung back into a nearby alleyway. The full force of the surrounding horror slams into my ears.  There is screaming and blood, fragments of debris raining down around the street.  Struggling to process what has just happened I slowly get to my feet, with a hand on the wall, I limp towards the sidewalk.  Sirens are arriving, and with it, policemen trying to tone down the blatant chaos with their reassuring voices.  I am now in the middle of it all, I hear more sirens, must be the ambulances, with the grim paramedics in the driver and passenger seats.  With ripping force, another explosion tears up the middle of the street.  Cars are careening out of the way; the police are dazed, and human terror is increasing steadily.  This is too much, the sound of rubble hitting the ground has become normal and expected in these few minutes of inexplicable shock.  Falling to my knees, hands open eyes wide and my ears bleeding, I stare at the gaping hole that now replaces the street corner.  Suddenly the smoke has been sucked out of the air back into the hole, it now looks like it belongs there, before my mind can try and make sense of that, I watch as something bursts out of the hole.  Humans have words for the things that are foreign to them, but as they have never been applied to something completely alien before, I had an extremely hard time trying to even believe what I was seeing.