It was the light that came first, before the explosion of sound, before the darkness,  so incandescent was the flash of light that it darkened all other light around itself, siphoned the sun right out of the sky, and with its own star-heat destroyed everything below it, so intense metal melted, humans and animals vaporized, water and blood boiled, then evaporated, those that didn’t disappear instantly turned to coal or worse survived without a layering of skin to hold their flesh. 

Then came a torrential wind, so powerful it flattened everything in its path, demolishing buildings, bridges, trains, windows shattered, trees came right out of the ground, houses and roof tiles flew into the air.  It picked me up and sent me  somersaulting backward, scorching my hair, flaying my face; and as I free fell in space, I saw the most minute details around me, each second an eternity ticking past me; tide after tide peeled people’s skin from their bodies.

I saw others flying past as the skin of their arms came loose like long gloves being ripped off, a man still sitting on his bicycle, but without clothes, peddling forward in midair as he traveled backward. I saw his eyeballs come loose from their sockets and stretch out in front of his face, while on the ground below an old woman tried to push the rope of her intestines back into the wound of her belly.

When I landed flat on the ground, a ridge of heat like a train of steamrollers rolled across my back, pressing me down until I felt I was traveling into the dark earth itself, and I let myself sink through the soil past the roots of once living plants, past the yams grown rich in golden color, their sugar weeping through their baked skin, and deeper still I went, past the largest, deepest taproot of the massive Kusu tree and I saw the enormous root trembling, fracturing the earth around itself so that great crevices appeared, creating caverns underground, and I descended further into a place so deep that nothing penetrated it, not even sound.  All sound disappeared and in that profound silence, I recalled that the cicadas had been chirping loudly, incessantly, all day long, until the light appeared, that made all worldly light seem inconsequential; and all the cicadas stopped chirping in unison, as if a conductor’s wand went up into the air and there it froze mid measure, and all the musicians in the world stopped playing. 

And then came the sound, a crescendo of such magnitude, it shattered the entire sky above, and everything went black.