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WINDOWS ON THE WORLD
You're nearly dozing at your desk when you hear the first supersonic boom and see the first flutter of debris. Your feet hit the floor abruptly, and a frisson of fear and panic propels you from the chair. You're practically leaping over your desk to reach the window, your tie flying ahead of you as if you've put your superhero cape on backwards.
You think, oddly, not of escape or even of danger, but of a fifth grade lesson on prepositions. In, out, around, beside, through, below, beneath, outside. You remember your teacher, Mrs. Bellows, clambering through and around your classroom's first-floor window while you and your classmates, despite thinking yourselves too cool for class and far too old to be mesmerized by an adult's repetitive motions, sat there entranced.
The lesson has stayed with you, and as you crouch, now, in front of your office's sole window with its cool metal frame and beige shade, you mentally add prepositions. Behind. Inside. As the horrors mount in front of you, you focus on that sense of being protected, locked away, boxed in. Safe and, comfortingly, too far away to help even if you tried. Behind and inside, cradled within the office that had seemed mind-numbingly dull and imprisoning as recently as that morning.
The things that fly past your porthole—when you reflect on it, you realize you haven't a way of opening it after all—are nearly indistinguishable. Metal and paper bits, some colored, others alight, flicker by, the sort of screensaver that holds your attention all afternoon rather than allowing you to get on with your work.
The first body, then, is like someone abruptly hitting the space bar. Even as close as you are to the scene, it's only a speck. But you can tell exactly what it is, as if you feel a kinship with the flailing, frightened body in its dark suit and staid-patterned tie. Its passing brings into sharp relief the surroundings you've muted, the thuds and screams and flames. For a moment you sense each sound and scent individually, and then they come together in a roar so loud and terrible your hands are over your ears before you realize it, and you're cowering on the floor.
It gets no quieter, and it's suddenly as if the window doesn't exist at all, as if that earlier leap over your desk had carried you clear out into the sky. You're out there with the flailers and screamers, you're one of them, arms and legs almost spread-eagle as you stretch your limbs from their sockets reaching for human contact. If you can only link hands with one person, you think, but you're plummeting too fast for lateral motion. You see faces in other windows flash by you, pressed up against the glass with their identical, childlike expressions of wonder and incomprehension.
Returning to your office floor is like falling out of bed: you wake upon impact with a moment of disorientation so complete it banishes the horror, briefly. You cry out, though you don't know why you're shouting—perhaps for a mother or father to explain away the nightmare, or perhaps because it's the only sound you can summon amidst the smog and the suffering.
You used to like to imagine yourself in dangerous scenarios from history. You'd fantasize about the daring escapes you could have made—from a battlefield or the Titanic—even where such escape proved impossible for those who came before. But here there is no escape, even for the clever daredevil of your imagination. There are only two choices: to be a passive observer or an unwilling one.
You stand up long enough to snap the shade decisively shut.
Sara Polsky's fiction has appeared in AlienSkin and Fictitious Force. Her nonfiction has appeared in Renaissance Magazine, Student Traveler, Mystery Scene Magazine, and other publications.
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