Excerpt:

It was cold. Never in my life had I felt this kind of cold before. It was a mind-numbing, stomach-clenching chill that seemed to wrap around my entire body and squeeze it tight until my lungs became constricted and my body almost seemed to literally freeze. My breath came in quick small huffs in the dark night, clouding from my mouth in a sudden wisp of white hot air.

It wasn’t even that cold though, if I was being honest. The clenching, the shivering, that feeling of icicles slowly creeping along every bone in my body and numbing me to the core, well, it had nothing to do with the actual temperature. In fact, it was pretty warm. It was coming from me, almost as if the freezing chill overtaking my body was from my very core, and paid no heed to outside temperatures whatsoever.

All around me were the sounds of people walking and talking, despite very late in the night. The sky had that dim orange-brown hue that it always seems to have when you’re standing in the middle of the city looking up, as if it’s absorbed some of the tinny yellow street light and is reflecting it back at you. Really, it’s just smog. The smell of beef kebabs and fast food restaurants swirled around on the wind so strongly you could almost taste the fat when you breathed, and all I could do was remember these things because it almost seemed I wasn’t there.

It was a struggle to blink, even though my eyes were streaming from being open so long, from the wind and the dust and lord knows what else that gets caught up in the quick small drives of breeze that pick up street debris and throw it in your face to taste. I almost could have been dead, kind of, almost. I wasn’t sure what was going on, I didn’t remember how I got there or how I knew I’d been there, but I was and I had. Like that strange feeling of déjà vous, a creeping recognition that you can’t place and don’t understand.

And I just sat there, shivering and clenching, feeling like I was slowly freezing to death inside my own body, because there wasn’t much else I could have done. To say that I understand it all now is no consolation, because in that single moment in time, I was terrified. Not just terrified. It was a true and raw feeling of panic that cannot be put into words as if you were describing someone’s appearance, or how the sky looked in the morning. No, it was pure and unadulterated terror that I felt that night, that only seemed to get worse as I watched the tinny street lamp coloured sky grow unnaturally bright above me. I heard a rumbling that had started so faint and had been growing so slightly that I wasn’t entirely sure that it hadn’t been there all along until it was nearly deafening, and all I could do was sit there and blink.

And it looked so pretty, you know? It really was beautiful. No one ever seems to appreciate the sad beauty of destruction, I think, unless it’s inevitably their own. And that night, I was admiring what was supposed to be my own destruction. The destruction of this city, the tinny street lamps, even the cold wind. I was witnessing the annihilation of millions of people, thousands of buildings, and the last vestiges of my childhood.

If my eyes weren’t already streaming, I’d have cried. But I couldn’t any way. All I could do was blink.