(working title)

I checked the window one last time to see the sky still shrouded in dark ash, with the quickly fading border between sun and moon turning the sky to a haunting orange. If I believed in God (well, maybe now was the time to start reconsidering my lack of faith), I would have thought he was busy decorating for a global Halloween party, the way the orange and wet grey intermingled with one another.

I looked down to the bowl of the crater, a cauldron bubbling sans Shakespeare’s Three Witches, but horrifying just the same. I watched as another bus came through the narrow streets, transporting more of the citizens of our sad excuse for a town to higher ground, the only defense we had. This was no New Orleans, I thought to myself. When our crater levees burst, there will be no chance of surviving by swimming, boating, floating your way to safety in contaminated water. The second that crater overflowed, you were fucked if you were anywhere under a mile close to it. That Anakin Skywalker bullshit where just some of his pieces burned up, resulting in his need for a shiny black suit and personalized vocoder? That’s all it was-Hollywood bullshit. In real life you get incinerated. You die. And as a bonus, you get cremated for free. There is no body for your loved ones to mourn over, no teeth for the coroner to match to your post-braces dental records. Poof.

My train of thought was quickly derailed as it started. I could see globs of the stuff start to plop up into the air, then heave themselves back down into the massive pot of scalding tomato soup. The ground began to tremble and I watched as the massive T-Rex and Stegosaurus that I had grown up climbing all over at Dino Park fell past the lip of the crater and into their own extinction. That’s when it began to spill over. That’s when the horror really, really set in.

We all rushed into the bedroom. The high pitched screaming of all of those little voices is a sound I will never forget. I imagine it’s what a slaughterhouse sounds like, which is exactly where we were. We, the adults, the smart ones who just so had our shit together, began scooping the little ones under the bed and into the bathtub. Sounds completely insane, right? I mean how in the fuck is hiding under a bed going to keep you safe from 1,250 degrees of molten earth? The same way that hiding under an elementary school desk protects you from radiation. The only power that we had was keeping these kids from panicking too, too much, thus avoiding a few years of therapy if we made it out alive.

I lie on the outermost spot under the bed, making me first to go if the lava seeped in. I thought I was being noble, but looking back, maybe I was being selfish. It’s all relative, as we would’ve all been gone within milliseconds of one another had it come. But it didn’t. And I’m here. And they’re here. And when it was all said and done, we all went out for banana milkshakes.