[Story] The Mess

Ahnaf Abdullah - The Mess - Graded 31/35 by Fariha Rabbani(Revised)
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He opened the door. What was left of the window beside shattered into innumerable pieces, making an earsplitting noise that echoed throughout the night.

A sudden, disastrous, 9.3-magnitude earthquake hit the city as the clock tower struck 12 am. Within the 22 seconds that felt like a lifetime, the city turned from a vivid range of skyscrapers and suburban homes to mountainous hills of rubble.

The house he was in, as unbelievable as it may seem, was still standing. It did help that the house was a single storey 'state of the art' suburban home, in a brilliantly designed duplex, but the house was not all-invincible. He immediately noticed a large crack on the wall beside his bed, where he decided to hide in during the earthquake. The large crack was populated by many small hairline cracks.

He got out of his room, and into the living room, where it looked like the aftermath of a teenager party, just without the leftovers. Tables and desks were upended and the things that were on top of them were scattered and strewn across the floor. His PlayStation was on the ground, in a definitely not good position, and his brand-new 4K Smart TV was neatly broken in two unique pieces. He prompted to do what his natural instincts were shouting at him to do: go outside.

It was like a concept snapshot of a disaster movie. Too much destruction. Too much rubble. Too much dust. And almost no noise. Most people would not rate the movie a full 5 stars because they would complain; 'It looks fake, man. Did Michael Bay direct this?'. You couldn't possibly have this much disaster in real life. Yet, the fake and unreal had become real.

And for the first time in his life, he had seen the horizon. A clean, flat line separating the skies and the earth, interrupted by no buildings, no clouds, no 'structures' of any sort. A hemisphere of pure black littered with faint stars, with only the Moon in sight.

He couldn't find a word to describe what he saw. It was beautiful. It was the first time he had ever seen the horizon, laden with a bowl of darkness amidst the ravaged and destroyed landscape. He ran back to his bungalow-with-a-cracked-wall to get his camera. He never wanted to forget this moment, never wanted to forget this scenery, this new side of nature brought about with this earthquake, the messy side.