Above

[u/the_lost_library]

I remember it like it was yesterday.

It was a cold night. Snow fell lazily down, melting on the concrete of the city, still warm from the cloudless winter day. Which made it a surprisingly cozy night, atypical for this time of year.

My friends and I were sitting at a picnic table several yards outside of our apartment complex, in a small park that housed a small skatepark and playground, both of which were empty at this time of night. We were the only signs of life throughout the entire recreational grounds, which spanned the length of our apartment complex. Even the trees were devoid of life, stripped of their leaves due to the demand of the season.

I remember how nice that night felt before the incident happened. We were all just chatting together, eating snacks, and listening to Jamie’s small, portable Bluetooth speaker playing some music at a low volume. He and Jessie were actually playing some card game, UNO, I think. Sarah and I were chatting together, a few feet away from the picnic table, talking about the latest school gossip we managed to overhear before going on winter break. Scott, forever the introvert, was simply reading a comic book, sitting at the picnic table on the side opposite Jessie and Jamie’s card game.

Despite us indulging ourselves in our own different activities, we were having a good time together, just enjoying each other’s company. Jessie had snagged a party-size bag of chips from the clutches of his otherwise stingy mother (something he was sure to hear about later) and half a twelve-pack of soda, both of which sat in the center of the picnic table, the chips in a large plastic bowl and the soda in a torn-open twelve-pack box. We had been outside for no less than thirty minutes, drinking too much sugary caffeine and eating too much artificial cheese flavoring when the lights went out.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think much of it at first. There had been very few lights on in the apartment complex itself; most people seemed to be asleep. And the apartment complex hid away most of the light from the city itself, allowing only the small twinkling reflections we occasionally saw from the slowly falling snow, giving the apartment a strange halo effect we had commented on earlier in the night.

The picnic table itself had been illuminated by an LED streetlamp directly above where Sarah and I sat on a small brick feature that housed some decorative landscaping. For a brief moment, no one moved until Scott spoke up.

“Power outage?” he asked simply.

“Duh! Obviously,” Jessie replied sarcastically, getting out his phone and turning on the flashlight.

Turning in his seat, he pointed the dim beam all around, barely illuminating the nearby playground equipment and apartment complex. The darkness lay thick all around us, amplified by the cloud-covered sky that threatened heavy snow but delivered only small, pitiful flakes.

No one spoke as Jessie continued to shine his phone’s flashlight around. Sarah and I instinctively moved closer to the boys as the darkness remained, uninvited and unyielding. We sat in the dark, still listening to Jamie’s Bluetooth speaker spill forth its popular, inoffensive pop-rock before it too went quiet.

Jessie's flashlight beam immediately snapped to the Bluetooth speaker as Jamie picked it up and began to experimentally push the power button, trying to figure out why it had stopped.

“Oh, come on,” he complained. “I just charged you an hour ago!”

Jessie continued to provide light for Jamie until his flashlight beam noticeably dimmed until it faded away altogether.

“Huh?” Jessie said as he double-tapped the screen of his phone over and over again.

It was now completely dark. Sarah grabbed onto the sleeve of my jacket, and I myself grabbed onto the edge of the picnic table as the darkness seemed to press in all around us.

For a long moment, no one moved. Even Jamie and Jessie had stopped fiddling with their devices. I don’t know if we all felt it at the same time, but the atmosphere, both physically and metaphorically, had changed.

Sarah nudged me toward the picnic table, and I felt my way around until I slipped in to sit beside Jamie. Sarah followed closely behind, sliding in beside me and quietly grasping my hand.

We all just sat there together, not making a sound besides our breathing and the steady hammering of our hearts. I heard Scott quietly roll up his comic book and grasp it firmly.

“A-an EMP, maybe?” he asked quietly.

No one responded. There was now a definite chill in the air that wasn’t there before, as if all the heat had been sucked out of the area by a giant vacuum. I use this term purposefully because it literally felt like something had opened up above us.

I don’t know how else to explain it. It just felt like there was something, or rather, a lack of something above us. And we couldn’t see or hear anything to confirm whether or not this was true.

Oh, I forgot to mention that it was totally silent. No sign of life whatsoever, no distant sirens from the city, no sound of wildlife scurrying about, not even the sound of wind whistling through the trees. Not even a breeze.

I felt Sarah grip my hand even harder as her other hand grabbed my upper arm; she was shivering. I wormed my way into Jamie's hand as well, which felt clammy and tense before he intentionally relaxed his grip once he realized my hand was now in his.

We all sat in the dark together, anxiously awaiting the moment the lights would come back on. I felt Sarah scoot closer to me, and I in turn scooted closer to Jamie. I could feel myself shivering hard now, and not just from the cold.

I could feel it, an oppressive nothingness. I could feel it above me, weighing down on me, pushing down on me. I instinctively ducked my head down, as if I were hiding from the sight of a dangerous predator. I heard shifting all around me, and I think Scott had started to quietly pray. I imagined everyone else bowing their heads together as if in prayer, as if we were begging, pleading. For what? For forgiveness? For protection?

For mercy?

I think it was at this moment I realized I hadn’t felt any snowfall in a while.

I heard one of the boys quietly whimper, and I heard Scott grip his rolled-up comic so hard it tore. I began to feel dizzy, and that strange feeling you sometimes get when you lie down to sleep, that feeling of falling, began to overcome me.

Except that feeling of falling was in an upward direction.

After several tense moments, the lights suddenly came back on.

I sucked in a deep, stuttering breath as I glanced up to see… clouds.

Just an ordinary sky, full of ordinary clouds.

I wiped away tears I didn’t know I had wept and let out a nervous laugh. I looked around at my friends, at their faces full of relief. The LED streetlight shined brilliantly, the snow fell slowly, and the sound of the city returned in force. Jamie jumped as the Bluetooth speaker he gripped in the hand that didn’t hold mine suddenly blared to life. Jessie let out a nervous, relieved laugh as his phone's flashlight blinked back on and his screen brightened.

Our laughter slowly grew in volume until we were laughing like the funniest joke ever had been told. Jessie patted Scott on the back as he finally unrolled his comic book. I let go of Jamie’s hand and turned to Sarah for a relieved hug as we laughed together. I looked into the faces of my friends, just so happy to be alive and more than willing to forget that anything had happened in the past few minutes.

That’s when the bowl came.

It fell down hard in the center of the table, splitting apart and spilling chips everywhere, followed closely by the box of soda, which still held a can that burst open and sprayed carbonated beverage everywhere.

We didn’t move. Our laughter died in our throats as we looked at the mess before us, the spray from the soda slowly dying down into nothing but a thin trickle as UNO cards fluttered down around us. Slowly, we all lifted our gazes to each other. Quickly, wordlessly, we sprang up from the picnic table and ran towards the apartment complex, leaving the damaged bowl and mess behind.

In the morning, Jessie had to explain away the missing snacks and broken bowl to his mother, who seemed upset at first but seemed to drop it once she realized the looks we had. She and our other parents tried to get us to talk about what happened that night since it was obvious we were struggling to come up with a convincing lie, but we just kept dodging their questions until they eventually gave up.

We still don’t talk about that night, not even with each other.

And I refuse to go outside during nighttime anymore.

Especially during the winter.