Bridge Out

 Bridge Out is a story in the online literary journal,  Half and One. 

Running

Warm, bright, beautiful spring and then you hear

a sound. A crack you’d call it.

The sound so loud you wonder that your ears still work.

And then you wonder if your ears still work.

The recoil in your body. And then a rumbling roaring.

Behind you, above the treeline, the mountain

the sunlight bounces off has shed its skin,

rumbling, roaring liquid wave of rock and dirt and gravel churning down.

 

When that enormous noise erupted you were contemplating coffee

admiring the morning, trying to decide between toast and a doughnut.

It took so long to reach you, you’d almost decided on the doughnut.

 

Young, healthy, perfectly safe for several minutes yet

you stare at the beloved mountain racing to devour you.

You have time.

 

What will you do with your last five minutes? Run?

Buy yourself seconds to regret everything

you never got to do? Lament your failures?

Console yourself somehow?

Pray?

I wonder if you’ll pray.

I believe you’ll run in blind panic aware, if the part of you

that is is still alive, you cannot get away in time.

You are perfectly safe. But still

the ever loudening roar is telling you in what might as well be words you can’t.

It happened already. It happened long ago.

It happened for you.