Unnatural Fear Number One

Sometimes, I'm awake and I'm waiting for it. I'm expecting it.

It will be a thousand thunderclaps at once or a shotgun blast in your head bouncing back and forth between your ears. It will be the sound of my bedroom door being kicked down in the middle of the night, splintering, the frame fractured and seeping its pine scent. Gabriel's horn will roll through the hills, beating the lush green mountains to dust and leveling humanity.

I flinch with each dropped box or gunshot that rings out in the dark, honestly worried it will be the thing that finally tips the scales out of our favor, setting flame to the short fuse rooted in the powder keg of night. The explosion will push across the universe, no atmosphere to slow its path. Its light will bloom so intensely from behind the sun that the warm rays of sunlight will be replaced with a thin caustic shadow withering plants and scattering the animals.

I've been waiting since I was a kid. I would lay there in the night, door cracked allowing light from the hallway to spill into the room, waiting for the crash..the explosion. Logically I don't really believe it will ever come, and I get the feeling that I keep imagining it so that if it ever does happen, I won't be surprised. I'll be the one person who knew.

And I'm still that kid. Sometimes, there in the night I still wonder when it will happen. When will the sky be torn apart leaving us to float in its blood? When will the monumental sound of everything stopping all at once rip us screaming from sleep?