Read on for an excerpt from my WIP scifi novel… (photo taken and edited by me)
“No matter what Cal said, he wasn’t too old to enjoy the carousel. In the Great Before, we would go there every weekend after church. Over time, I’d graduated from the individual pony that glided up and down, cream-colored with purple trim and a caramel-painted mane, to a sophisticated, padded carriage more befitting a young woman of my eleven-now-twelve years. Cal had attachments to that thing and its dancing sculptures that I wouldn’t understand.
“Come on, Nugget,” I said to him. “I know where your cowboy hat is!” He tried to hide a smile, tucked the holoreader under his arm, and stood up, ready to play Nat Love.
And so, that morning found us bouncing up the steps to the mall, determined to celebrate what we could and put what we could not out of mind for just a little bit. Cal wanted to race, so we did, but carrying everything I cared about in the pockets of the two coats I wore on top of each other, I felt like I might pass out before we got to our destination - 100 degrees in the middle of September. Should be illegal. Summer never ended anymore.
Cal would have beat me by a landslide, but I lunged for him and grabbed his jeans playfully right before the top. We fell over in a pile at the top of the stairs. It was cheating, sure, but it was also lucky. When we looked up, we saw it happen. The mall and the carousel in the center of the outdoor food court, tons of people clinging to a semblance of normal life, all of it.
The air above us and a few feet ahead wavered slightly - in the way that air dances from the heat above a campfire - so slight that you question whether you saw it at all… but over a much larger area. And then, a perfect blackness swallowed all that the ground had been, and everything atop it began to slide out of existence.
The screams of the scrambling shoppers, the carousel-riders, and their attentive parents were skull-shattering, then they were a faint echo, and then they, like the three department stores and the cream-colored pony with the purple trim, were nothing but a memory. It all happened so fast. All we could do was… watch.”
