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12.26.2015

Tern hit the parking lot’s pavement, and his breath left his lungs with the impact. He lay there waiting for the air to come back to him, staring up to the night sky above him. The stars twinkled in the distance and he felt colder.

The ground trembled under him and slowly his lungs unstuck and pulled air back in. Which his breath back, he rolled onto his side. He faced the hill and saw small rivers of static making their way down the mud. The hill wiped bare of grass where he had slid down.

Now Tern felt the mud and water that soaked through his coat, jeans, and shows. Several of the small streams disappeared into the cracks in the hill that had opened moments before. Moonlight glinted off the staticwet surfaces.

He pushed himself back up to a seated position and took stock of his person. Grass and mud fell from his head and landed on his lap and the shoulders of his coat. Another tremble passed under him. Further to the west, a tree collapsed, slid down the mud, and crashed into the pavement with a bright-light impact, which immediately faded back to darkness.

Tern stood up, wanting to get away from the hillside and other trees that might come down next. Halfway across the parking lot, he looked back to the mountains. They sat cloven into four huge chunks. Beams of light blasting up and down into infinity. The colors shifted from green back to white and grew in intensity. The lights started to move, to vibrate and ripple. Energy built and culminated in the lights being a set of standing waves. The peaks and troughs let out a puff of smoke and rained sparks down on the ground, which was broken further by the waves impacting new land as it vibrated and went further and further from the baseline. Bolts of lightning leapt up from the chasms in the mountains and struck the light chords.

The infusion of energy caused the wave to explode with tension. And pieces of each wave sheared from the rest and flew directly toward Tern, shrinking and dimming as they traveled, and finally hit Tern directly in the eyes before he could process what was happening and move aside. His body was thrown back with the force of the impact and he hit a car parked in the lot. He then crumpled to the cracked tar below him.

A trio of white lines were burned into his vision. Deep, valley-like scars across his cornea, like what had afflicted him in the park yesterday. He could make out the world around the lines, which streaked his vision from top to bottom, but the lines burned white, thick, and opaque on his sight.

A group of trees collapsed down the hillside and obliterated the pavement on which he had just lain. An explosion of light and sparks, like an electric transformer blowing, rained down around him. Tern scrambled back to his feet and took off running toward the mall. The stores still appeared open, from what he could make out past the light beams scarring the world’s image as he ran.