Crack in the Sky

For a moment, I didn’t know what caused the noise, but when I looked up, I saw the crack in the clear blue sky above me.  The sound was far louder and sharper than a peal of thunder. There was no roar, no prelude, no crescendo, no echo. Instead, the event took place in an instantaneous, explosive eruption of monstrous power, lasting only a fraction of a second.

I don’t know whether I felt fear or simply confusion, but whatever it was is is etched into my mind as if seared into my brain by a laser beam. That sight, that jagged crack above me, was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was as if the sky were made of a sheet of hot glass, suddenly fractured after plunging in ice cold water. That’s the only way I can describe it.

After the crack opened up, that’s when I felt fear. Terror, actually. As I stood, transfixed by this incident I could not understand, I saw an airliner, a passenger jet, careen wildly as it neared the gaping hole. In an instant, it disappeared into the crack. And, then, another one seemed to be swept into the fissure. It was as if the atmosphere were being sucked up through that wound in the sky, taking the planes with it.

All of this happened within the space of a minute or less, though at the time it seemed to me like hours. And then the crack closed; like the sky healed itself. I was alone at the time, but I assumed others must have seen what I saw. But no one else came forward to say so.

Were it not for the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration reported that two airliners mysteriously disappeared that day, I would have said I must have experienced a mental break. Television news and the newspapers are abuzz with speculation about what might have happened to the two jets and the three hundred and twenty some-odd people on them. I don’t know what happened to them; I only know those planes dissolved into a crack in the sky.