Paradise Flower

Aloha!

                   Here's a photo I shot a couple weeks ago. It's the inspiration for today's story.

                                 The Event Horizon

      The signature of normalcy that night never arrived. A lone officer dug through the rubble. Near the front of the building, Sgt Annie Anders closed her eyes as if to calm herself. When she opened her eyes she saw it. Her heart pulsed as she approached with her flashlight.

      "Well, I guess this answers one question ," she whispered with a sense of scientific discovery. 

       Her chest rose with deeper breaths now. Her boots left watery impressions as she scanned the remaining rubble through the night wetness with her flashlight, looking for another body. The shear wind was gone, but the drizzle remained.

         "Oh god!" she screamed silently, looking down.

      She imagined that the report would have to say there was no identification, but she knew better. 

     "He has a wedding band," she said softly. "and somewhere a wife and a ..." 

       She thought, a loving man.

       The rain pulsed as Annie's eyes followed her flashlight beam across the darkness over mounds of more rubble. She tried to calm herself, but nothing here gave her any comfort. 

       

       The only standing structure left was on the corner, down at the end of the block, an old Starbucks. Annie eased herself down the street to try to see something. 

       On a normal day, people would be safe inside there, she thought.

       "The weather station will call it a tornado, a night tornado." She looked up and noticed the street lights redden. 

       This was no windstorm, she thought. A tornado doesn't strike the heart of the city. No, this thing had all the earmarks of a gravity event. And this one had a non-random target cycle.

        Annie  went back to the man's body and waited for a response on her radio. She looked straight ahead, once in a while forcing herself to follow the beam of her flashlight. The force had sent things in a direction nobody expected. She looked down again at what she considered to be the body's only form of identification.

          "A gold band around his finger, that's all," she said aloud. "What a funny  thought." 

           This pile of rubble was once some kind of store. The remainder of the building, still standing, had been rented by a local church.

          "Another male seeking shelter." Annie's gaze turned gentle. "The force just crushed its will on him, had its way."

          A slight glimmer of sympathy began a slow melt within Annie. She thought about that golden ring on his hand and those cold hard bricks individually tightening their grip on his lifeless body.                            

           Gravity still having it's say, she thought, indenturing his body with creases like a newly minted jigsaw puzzle. 

           Annie tried her radio again.

           "Doesn't this thing ever work?" she said aloud. The radio remained silent.

           She looked down again, as if to offer a prayer. "... last moments locked in a battle with a pulsed force, until in the end, there was no more pulse for either."

            "Base.....come in base," Annie tried again. Still no answer.