The day had been off. I couldn’t seem to get anything right, but I guess for me that was normal. I was walking home, down the sidewalk on Fifth Street; the city traffic was congested, agitating and loud. I grumbled silently to myself. It will all be over soon, I thought. The sun was just beginning its daily descent and I caught a glimpse of it in the reflection of a building across the street.

A woman was shouting at a child while I waited at the intersection, begging the light to change. Again, the reflection caught my eye, and I wondered for a brief moment at the world shining back at me through the glass walls of the skyscraper. It seemed almost like an inverse, a mockery, and somewhere I wondered if my reflection was happier than I. It seemed almost as if it were. The walking man light came on across the intersection and I stepped onto the crosswalk, looking at the faded white lines on the pavement, and counting each one as I stepped over them.

I was to the eleventh line, a little over halfway across, when I felt it. It was nothing like I had ever felt before. My gut twisted and riled, my bones betrayed me and froze, while my gaze shifted inadvertently to the sky. Apparently, the people around me had felt it too, for I was not the only one who had stopped. Drivers and passengers began to pile out of their vehicles and the street quickly crowded with bystanders, each of us with our heads to the sun.

The sky had taken a hue, unlike any I had ever seen, orange tinged with greens and white. I could feel my lips trembling “no”, my entire being seemed to be screaming it. I watched in horror as the sun seemingly eclipsed, becoming a gaping dark absence in the sky. In instinct I averted my eyes, shielding them in the crook of my arm. That’s when the light came. A pure white, searing thing that hurt my eyes, even though they were closed and covered.

My hands fled to my ears as a cacophony of sound ambushed them. At first it was the sound of a thousand screams, all happening at once, but it escalated in the matter of a second to a deafening roar that left my skull aching and my ears bleeding. Panic spread through the street. People around me ran aimlessly, blinded from the flash. My vision was blurry and the world was silent. I stumbled over to the sidewalk and gazed at the glass building, I watched through the reflection as fire started to fall from the sky, as it shattered the glass into oblivion.

Fear gripped me, and I ran following a group of people around me into the basement of a nearby apartment building. Down in the cement confines of the basement, we were cramped and crowded, all of us afraid and silent. I staggered over to the wall and slid down to the floor, my head fell into my hands and I wept. It felt like a childish thing to do, crying, surrounded by strangers.