Black Sky

3.

I dove to the floor before my mind had fully processed what was going on. My arms flung over my head, cradling it. My stomach pressed hard against the cold gym floor and my legs splayed in diverging directions. Sweat trickling down my forehead and off my eyelids, dripping gently from dark brown lashes. My heart pounded against the cage inside me and slammed itself against my eardrums over and over and over again. Black flies whizzing past my ears and soaring over my head, screams echoing off the thin walls and ricocheting around the hall. My vision blurred, blinding white light rained down in strips from the ceiling,casting soft reflections onto the shining floor and swimming through seas of blue and green hues duplicated onto the ceiling beams.

Once my vision was regained the screams began to subdue, fading from piercing screeches of pain and despair to gentle sobs and coughs that seemed to wrack the body with seizures and then to a deafening silence. The silence of twenty six freshly dug graves, the earth still wet with dewy tears.

The silence dragged on for what felt like decades and I lay motionless among my peers;eyes tightly closed and lips sealed in a thin, long line as to stop the screams that were clawing at my lungs. The polished wood sat beneath me, sticky with wine and salt, glistening under the blinding white light of the gym ceiling. Scrunching my eyes closed even tighter ,I took a shaky inhale,praying to anything and everything, praying for what... I do not know. Just hoping for a glimmer of movement, any sign of life in this polished wood cemetery.

I remember thinking of the face, the one I couldn't put a name to. The one that started this all. I thought about those eyes; the same eyes that searched the classroom for an explanation, for emotion, for hope.