Yellow Sky

I cut Econ 101 to day-drink with classmates at some bar near campus. By 3 PM I was pleasantly buzzed, walking back to my apartment alone through streets that hummed their usual symphony. Traffic, construction, ten thousand conversations bleeding together into white noise.

Somewhere during the walk, I noticed the sky had gone yellow. Not sunset yellow. Wrong yellow. I stopped on the sidewalk, stared up at it. Kept walking.

Then I noticed the quiet. Not silence, the city never went silent, but something underneath the noise had dropped out. Like the world was holding its breath. I felt uneasy in a way I couldn't articulate past the pleasant buzz humming in my skull.

I made it back to my apartment, eighth floor. Kicked off my shoes. The walls started moving.

I laughed. I actually laughed, alone in my apartment. "Okay, I'm done," I said. The pleasant vertigo of three beers and shots on an empty stomach.

But the walls kept moving. The floor rolled under my feet in long, lazy swells. My brain kept insisting this was the room spinning, my body swaying, nothing more. The bottles on my shelf rattled. My framed poster fell. The building groaned. Metal tearing somewhere deep in its bones. It felt like minutes.

Still took me another few seconds to go to the window.

The Burnham Hotel across the street wasn't there anymore. Where five stories of concrete and glass should have been, there was rubble. Just rubble. Dust rising in a brown cloud. And underneath the dust, the screaming started.

I was on the eighth floor. Concrete and steel that could become a tomb. My hand found the door.