Short Story 1 — “Skyfall”
Despite the early hour, the air was thick with heat from sidewalk vents, only barely cooled by autumn’s chill. Already, a cacophony of blaring horns and sirens had met the white noise of voices and ringing mobile phones and had become a visceral element in the atmosphere pressing against the earth. People surged in and out of buildings seamlessly, carried by some invisible current and above the bustle of New York life, stood the giants in the sky, already teeming with activity. A white speck on the horizon, heralded by the distant roar of a jet engine did nothing to wake the swift-moving throng on the city floor from the daze of their daily lives.
In New York, life seems to happen on a linear plane. Between navigating the busy streets of Wall Street bankers, scanning faces for the occasional film star, avoiding bumping into haphazardly strewn stands and window-shopping for fashion — fresh off the runway, the average New Yorker rarely lifts his or her head out of their line of sight, to survey the space above. In fact, the roar of a jet engine overhead, is less likely to elicit reaction than the squawk of a pigeon. Tourists like Lydia, Marlowe and Jane Johnson are easily identified by their tendency to stop suddenly on a crowded sidewalk and gawk, slack-jawed at sunlight-gilded skyscrapers, while throngs of angry natives protest the instantaneous pedestrian traffic-jam and beeline around them.
Perhaps this is why on that day, the three girls were some of the first to notice the unusually low-flying aircraft as it weaved between the mammoth structures. “The oddness of its position in the sky struck me instantly; but I had to convince Jane and Lydia that something was wrong.” Marlowe’s suspicion was confirmed within seconds as the plane dipped lower and it became apparent that it was being aimed at the World Trade Center. Neither she, nor her sisters took any pleasure in being right, as their parents — Jack and Tabitha Johnson were meeting with lawyers from a firm on the 15th floor. “For a moment it seemed like time had stopped. People were screaming at the people who had jumped from the building, and at the plane, but we couldn’t do anything,” says Lydia, as a tear makes a wet path down her cheek.
For other bystanders who stood transfixed by the sight of a Boeing 767 jet crashing into the World Trade Center, it seemed like Atlas himself had shrugged off the burden of the sky, and sent it streaming down towards them in fiery fragments. For the Johnson girls, the whole world had imploded, and they could do nothing but watch it, and their parents, burn.
So I wrote this for my feature writing class based on a image prompt that I can’t find online but my teacher gushed about it to our class and I’m quite proud of it, seeing as I wrote it in about 30 minutes. She gave it 4.75 out of 5.
