On the morning of the Shattering, Clara stood on the patio, looking out at the sky.
The crack was small at first, nothing more than a pronounced vein in the horizon’s pale blue skin. If it had been any smaller, she would have dismissed it as a balloon or the grey trail of a plane. But it was too dark, and upon second glance, she could have sworn she saw it slowly moving, spreading. The world kept buzzing beneath her, undisturbed, the busy people under her with warm coffees balanced on their one free arm, the taxi engines chortling as they passed. No one stopped to notice that crack in the sky, and when her mother came outside to fetch Clara for breakfast, she didn’t notice it either.
“Come on, darling,” her mother said, taking her by the arm into the kitchen. “Your breakfast’s getting cold.”
The crack was small at first, nothing more than a pronounced vein in the horizon’s pale blue skin. If it had been any smaller, she would have dismissed it as a balloon or the grey trail of a plane. But it was too dark, and upon second glance, she could have sworn she saw it slowly moving, spreading. The world kept buzzing beneath her, undisturbed, the busy people under her with warm coffees balanced on their one free arm, the taxi engines chortling as they passed. No one stopped to notice that crack in the sky, and when her mother came outside to fetch Clara for breakfast, she didn’t notice it either.
“Come on, darling,” her mother said, taking her by the arm into the kitchen. “Your breakfast’s getting cold.”
Clara sat down next to her, poking the warm grits around with her spoon. Her dog, Max, sat beside her, and she slipped a bit of her food under the table for him every once in awhile. She felt his tongue licking her hand clean of crumbs, his nose buried in her fingers. She scratched him behind the ears.
“Your father left early today,” her mother said, her voice slightly bitter.
Clara nodded. She could feel her mother’s eyes on her, but she continued looking down, thinking about the crack she had seen. It felt too real to be imagined, but she knew her mother wouldn’t think that, even if she had seen it out there. She would dismiss it as a trick of the eye, an optical illusion, and tell Clara to stop fooling around. Perhaps that was true. Still, even as her mother drove her to school, she continued looking out into the sky, searching for that small fissure in its skin.
At school, she drifted through the halls, staying out of conversation and eye contact. During classes, she doodled the sky with the crack on her paper. She was unable to keep her mind off of it, hanging in the air above them all. She wondered if it was just a little fissure, or if it would spread, slowly crack the sky open like an egg.
After her fourth period class, when the rest of her grade went to eat lunch, she asked her teacher if she could stick around in the classroom. It was her science teacher, Ms. Gretis, one of the few who Clara got along with. She agreed, trusting Clara to be responsible while she was gone from the classroom. Clara nodded, and Ms. Gretis walked off, very pleased to have a student appear so interested in science.
In the silence of the classroom, Clara took out a pair of binoculars from the supply cabinet and went to the window. It took her a little while to locate the crack from earlier, but once she did, she put on her binoculars and looked out at it.
Immediately, her suspicion was confirmed: the crack was getting larger. It was hard to see from far back, but up close, she could almost see it opening, the little black branches blooming behind the clouds. It terrified her, but it fascinated her just as much, and she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Even when the bell rang, and her teacher returned, she was hesitant to put the binoculars away. She considered telling her class what she had seen, but she imagined the looks she’d get from the students, the scoffs she’d hear from perhaps even Ms. Gretis, and decided not to. No, she’d keep this to herself. Regardless, she figured, it if kept growing, they’d notice soon enough.
For the rest of the day, Clara operated mechanically, walking from class to class as she waited eagerly for the day to end. Around the end of the day, a storm began to brew outside, and she suspected it had something to do with the crack. When the last bell rang, she almost sprinted to her mother’s car.
On the drive back, however, the storm clouds seemed to conceal the crack. She was a bit disappointed, and no matter which angle she peered at it from, she couldn’t get a good look. Still, every once in awhile, a little bit protruded from behind a cloud. She hadn’t felt fear like this in a long time, and deep down, she couldn’t deny that it excited her.
When she came home, she ran right up to the patio to get a better view of the crack, Max darting right after her.
“What’s the big rush?” Her mother said behind her. When Clara didn’t reply, she walked off, somewhat irritated. Clara didn’t have time to worry about her mother, though. There was a crack in the sky to witness.
It took a long time to catch a decent glimpse of it, but once she did, she nearly jumped. It had more than doubled in size, and still spreading, covering about an eighth of the sky. Behind it, she could see a vast expanse of darkness, stretching infinitely away. The crack was quickly covered again by the clouds, but she had gotten what she was waiting for. It was like a slow crumbling of the atmosphere, a cosmic falling-apart, a shattering. The Shattering. That was a good name for it, she decided.
Beneath her, she heard her mother yelling, “Clara! Come to dinner!” She pretended not to hear, wanting to see a glimpse of the full thing one more time, but soon her mother was up there, telling her to come to dinner immediately. Reluctantly, she went downstairs, sitting down next to her mother.
They sat in silence for a while, eating their food and staring at anything but each other. It was not that Clara had much against her mother, but they didn’t have much in common to talk about either, and she preferred the silence to an awkward conversation. Besides, she had the Shattering - a name that she thought of with considerable pride - to think about.
Still, her mother spoke.
“Your father is late,” she said after a while, glaring over at Clara. When she didn’t meet her eyes, Clara’s mother looked down, prodding at her food at a while before saying, “I don’t like it one bit.”
“I’m sure he’s just a bit late, Mom,” Clara said, wanting to bat away the conversation. But her mother took this as the perfect opportunity to show her discontent.
“An hour and a half late,” she said. “And for the third time this week.”
“What if there’s just traffic?” Clara said, a bit defensively. “What if he’s got a lot of work?”
“A lot of work? Please.” Clara’s mother scoffed. After a while, she added, “he used to call when there was traffic.”
“Don’t be paranoid, mom,” Clara said.
“Paranoid?” Her mother replied, slamming her hand down on the table. “How am I so ‘unreasonable’? He’s been late more often this week, he rarely answers when I ask him about it, he goes god-knows-where on the weekends. And you just call it off as bullshit.”
Clara set down her fork and knife, her half-empty plate in front of her.
“I’m done, Mom,” she said. “I gotta go to my room.”
Her mother seemed ready to spark for a second, but she held herself back.
“Alright,” she said. “But whatever you may say, I’m not just being paranoid. Think about it.”
With that, her mother took Clara’s plate, dumping its contents into her own. Clara headed upstairs, trying not to think about what her mother had said, trying to focus on the crack instead.
She stepped out onto the patio for a moment to see the crack. It was big enough to be largely visible behind the clouds now, but they concealed some of it. The storm was getting stronger, and there was rumbling coming from behind the sky, as if in response to the growing crack. Bits of grey water were starting to fall from the sky, and the stormclouds concealed much of the crack. She watched its corners grow slowly outwards for a few minutes before heading inside.
She tried to do her work in her room, but couldn’t focus. She hadn’t paid attention in class, and the strange words and mathematical formulas seemed like a different language to her at the time. Besides, if the Shattering continued, she doubted she’d go to school the next day.
She stared at her wall. There were a few pictures of her, and in the middle of them hung a photo of her family, sitting on a picnic blanket and watching the sky. Max sat beside them, his nose upturned curiously toward the sunset. Clara wondered if the sky would ever look like that again, or if it would fall away completely, an unrepairable heap of glass shards around the world.
Max came up beside her, as though he’d known she was looking at that picture. He buried his soft, wet nose in her palm, tail wagging halfheartedly behind him. She wondered if Max knew what was coming, and she wondered as well if he could remember the day they took that photograph. They had lived in a sort of snow-globe world that year, so nice and neat and perfect it could be set on display. It seemed like that now, at least. No, she figured, Max probably couldn’t remember.
Outside the window, Clara heard her father’s car pull up, its engine gurgling for a few seconds before coming to a stop. She knew her mother had stopped, because, beneath her, all sound and movement stopped, as though her mother had suddenly frozen up. The house was so quiet that Clara could hear the dangling of her father’s keys as they unlocked the door, could almost feel her father’s breath stop as he entered the house to find his wife staring at him.
“You’re late,” her mother said.
“...Yes. There was a storm,” her father said, hesitant. “Why?”
“Don’t give me that bullshit about a storm,” her mother said, angrily. “I don’t know where you were, but you sure as hell weren’t late three days in a row with that same excuse.”
“It’s not an excuse, Jill,” he said. Clara could imagine his face, scruffy and surprised, unsure what to say. “Why are you so insistent that I’m lying to you?”
“I’ve lived with you for eleven years,” her mother said. “And I can notice that something’s changed.”
“You’re just being paranoid, Jill.”
At that, Clara’s mother let loose. Swear-decorated sentences flew about the house for several minutes, and she stomped as she spoke, rattling the whole house stronger than the storm outside. After a while, she slowed down, gradually coming to a stop. Her father’s voice began to speak again in its careful, defensive tone, when suddenly, there was the sound of a shattering plate.
Clara jumped. Someone must have thrown that. It wasn’t unusual for her mother and father to argue, but it had never gotten to this. In search of comfort, she reached for Max, but he seemed frozen, his body quivering with fear. The rumbling of the storm had already put him on edge, and the plate had seemed to do something strange to him. He stood there for a few seconds, petrified. Beneath them, another plate shattered, and with a sudden yelp, Max darted down the stairs and out the door, which Clara’s father must have left open.
“No, Max!” she yelled, but he was gone.
She sighed. She didn’t want to go downstairs, didn’t want to see the shattered plate or her mother and father in their argument, or feel their eyes on her. But Max couldn’t be out there. The storms drove him wild; he seemed to mistake the thunder for growling, the storm as another dog. Left out there, he would likely run out in the way of some cars.
She took a deep breath and, without raising her eyes, ran downstairs and sprinted out into the street.
The second she stepped out of her door, though, she froze, her breath leaving her. The sky above was splintering; the crack, which had been just a small vein that morning, now yawned its dark mouth through the sky. Bits of debris chipped away as it opened, little shards tumbling to the ground.
Part of her wanted to sit down on the ground and watch the sky open, unfold over the city. But she had to get Max from the yard, or else he’d be caught in those falling bits of sky.
“Max! Here, Max!” She yelled into the storm. It was dark, and the dog seemed nowhere in sight. No one was on the street to help her search.
After a while of running around and repeating his name, she sat down, looking up toward the sky. What would they do when it was gone? She hadn’t thought about this, but now that she considered it, she found no answer. They could build a new one, perhaps, out of glass or plastic. Maybe they could build a mirror up there, so we could look up and see the world peering back at us, see the swarms of people walking and dancing through the world. But she doubted it could be as good as the old one. She had always loved this sky, if not very consciously. She could recall moments years ago when she and her father had gone out before it, walking together and marvelling at it. No sky could replace this one.
Nearby, she heard the sound of Max’s howling. She called for him again, and he emerged from the dim street before her, coming to her side. Taking his soft body in her arms, she headed home.
When she came back to her doorstep, however, she did not feel as though she wanted to go in. The usual comfort she found in seeing her home seemed to be faltering. No, she did not want to enter, did not want to be around her mother. Instead, she wanted to wander back out, glimpse the crack again. She wanted to bid the sky farewell.
So, upon opening the door, she let Max back in, made sure he wasn’t trying to run again, and then went back out to the storm. Behind her, her mother’s yelling could still be heard from behind the door. She could no longer hear her father protesting. She could imagine him, sitting still in his chair, watching his wife storm through the house. Clara was glad she was gone.
She strolled through the street, staring up at the sky. After walking for a while, she sat down on the grass of someone’s lawn, staring up at the Shattering.
She sighed. Somewhere inside her, she wished she had someone to share this moment with. This part of her imagined them all, her mother, father, Max, and her, sitting before the deconstructing sky, all holding each other, talking and laughing as the pieces tumbled down. No, she thought. It’s silly to think about that. Something like that hadn’t happened for years. No, she should enjoy this moment for herself.
The thunder was getting louder and louder up there, and she could see the largest cracks so far forming around the sky. These fissures had taken up almost the entire sky now; it wasn’t long before they got all the way around it, and when that happened, the entire thing would surely topple.
Goodbye, sky, she thought to herself. She would miss it, miss its warm summer grin and its pretty, dreamlike sunsets. She figured she had taken it for granted for all these years, like a distant friend that one never really notices, but whose presence one still subconsciously relies on. She felt sorry for that. Of course, she’d still have a few pictures to remind her of what it once looked like, but it wouldn’t be the same as seeing it up there.
In the distance, she suddenly heard a voice calling for her.
“Clara!” It yelled, muffled by the mumbling thunder above. Still, she could recognize it as her father’s voice. She sat still, pretending not to hear it. She didn’t want to be taken back, and besides, the most beautiful part was coming. There, far above her, one panel of the sky seemed to detach slowly, peeling away like a scab from the sky.
“Clara! Where are you?” The voice yelled, somewhere closer to her. “Clara, come home. Your mother and I are searching for you.” There was a pause, and she thought she heard footsteps a little ways behind her. “Clara, please.” She took a breath. “It’ll be alright now.”
Above her, the sky shattered, its millions of small shards finally breaking apart over the world. It was as beautiful, she decided, as a thousand snow-globes shattering.
“Your father left early today,” her mother said, her voice slightly bitter.
Clara nodded. She could feel her mother’s eyes on her, but she continued looking down, thinking about the crack she had seen. It felt too real to be imagined, but she knew her mother wouldn’t think that, even if she had seen it out there. She would dismiss it as a trick of the eye, an optical illusion, and tell Clara to stop fooling around. Perhaps that was true. Still, even as her mother drove her to school, she continued looking out into the sky, searching for that small fissure in its skin.
At school, she drifted through the halls, staying out of conversation and eye contact. During classes, she doodled the sky with the crack on her paper. She was unable to keep her mind off of it, hanging in the air above them all. She wondered if it was just a little fissure, or if it would spread, slowly crack the sky open like an egg.
After her fourth period class, when the rest of her grade went to eat lunch, she asked her teacher if she could stick around in the classroom. It was her science teacher, Ms. Gretis, one of the few who Clara got along with. She agreed, trusting Clara to be responsible while she was gone from the classroom. Clara nodded, and Ms. Gretis walked off, very pleased to have a student appear so interested in science.
In the silence of the classroom, Clara took out a pair of binoculars from the supply cabinet and went to the window. It took her a little while to locate the crack from earlier, but once she did, she put on her binoculars and looked out at it.
Immediately, her suspicion was confirmed: the crack was getting larger. It was hard to see from far back, but up close, she could almost see it opening, the little black branches blooming behind the clouds. It terrified her, but it fascinated her just as much, and she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Even when the bell rang, and her teacher returned, she was hesitant to put the binoculars away. She considered telling her class what she had seen, but she imagined the looks she’d get from the students, the scoffs she’d hear from perhaps even Ms. Gretis, and decided not to. No, she’d keep this to herself. Regardless, she figured, it if kept growing, they’d notice soon enough.
For the rest of the day, Clara operated mechanically, walking from class to class as she waited eagerly for the day to end. Around the end of the day, a storm began to brew outside, and she suspected it had something to do with the crack. When the last bell rang, she almost sprinted to her mother’s car.
On the drive back, however, the storm clouds seemed to conceal the crack. She was a bit disappointed, and no matter which angle she peered at it from, she couldn’t get a good look. Still, every once in awhile, a little bit protruded from behind a cloud. She hadn’t felt fear like this in a long time, and deep down, she couldn’t deny that it excited her.
When she came home, she ran right up to the patio to get a better view of the crack, Max darting right after her.
“What’s the big rush?” Her mother said behind her. When Clara didn’t reply, she walked off, somewhat irritated. Clara didn’t have time to worry about her mother, though. There was a crack in the sky to witness.
It took a long time to catch a decent glimpse of it, but once she did, she nearly jumped. It had more than doubled in size, and still spreading, covering about an eighth of the sky. Behind it, she could see a vast expanse of darkness, stretching infinitely away. The crack was quickly covered again by the clouds, but she had gotten what she was waiting for. It was like a slow crumbling of the atmosphere, a cosmic falling-apart, a shattering. The Shattering. That was a good name for it, she decided.
Beneath her, she heard her mother yelling, “Clara! Come to dinner!” She pretended not to hear, wanting to see a glimpse of the full thing one more time, but soon her mother was up there, telling her to come to dinner immediately. Reluctantly, she went downstairs, sitting down next to her mother.
They sat in silence for a while, eating their food and staring at anything but each other. It was not that Clara had much against her mother, but they didn’t have much in common to talk about either, and she preferred the silence to an awkward conversation. Besides, she had the Shattering - a name that she thought of with considerable pride - to think about.
Still, her mother spoke.
“Your father is late,” she said after a while, glaring over at Clara. When she didn’t meet her eyes, Clara’s mother looked down, prodding at her food at a while before saying, “I don’t like it one bit.”
“I’m sure he’s just a bit late, Mom,” Clara said, wanting to bat away the conversation. But her mother took this as the perfect opportunity to show her discontent.
“An hour and a half late,” she said. “And for the third time this week.”
“What if there’s just traffic?” Clara said, a bit defensively. “What if he’s got a lot of work?”
“A lot of work? Please.” Clara’s mother scoffed. After a while, she added, “he used to call when there was traffic.”
“Don’t be paranoid, mom,” Clara said.
“Paranoid?” Her mother replied, slamming her hand down on the table. “How am I so ‘unreasonable’? He’s been late more often this week, he rarely answers when I ask him about it, he goes god-knows-where on the weekends. And you just call it off as bullshit.”
Clara set down her fork and knife, her half-empty plate in front of her.
“I’m done, Mom,” she said. “I gotta go to my room.”
Her mother seemed ready to spark for a second, but she held herself back.
“Alright,” she said. “But whatever you may say, I’m not just being paranoid. Think about it.”
With that, her mother took Clara’s plate, dumping its contents into her own. Clara headed upstairs, trying not to think about what her mother had said, trying to focus on the crack instead.
She stepped out onto the patio for a moment to see the crack. It was big enough to be largely visible behind the clouds now, but they concealed some of it. The storm was getting stronger, and there was rumbling coming from behind the sky, as if in response to the growing crack. Bits of grey water were starting to fall from the sky, and the stormclouds concealed much of the crack. She watched its corners grow slowly outwards for a few minutes before heading inside.
She tried to do her work in her room, but couldn’t focus. She hadn’t paid attention in class, and the strange words and mathematical formulas seemed like a different language to her at the time. Besides, if the Shattering continued, she doubted she’d go to school the next day.
She stared at her wall. There were a few pictures of her, and in the middle of them hung a photo of her family, sitting on a picnic blanket and watching the sky. Max sat beside them, his nose upturned curiously toward the sunset. Clara wondered if the sky would ever look like that again, or if it would fall away completely, an unrepairable heap of glass shards around the world.
Max came up beside her, as though he’d known she was looking at that picture. He buried his soft, wet nose in her palm, tail wagging halfheartedly behind him. She wondered if Max knew what was coming, and she wondered as well if he could remember the day they took that photograph. They had lived in a sort of snow-globe world that year, so nice and neat and perfect it could be set on display. It seemed like that now, at least. No, she figured, Max probably couldn’t remember.
Outside the window, Clara heard her father’s car pull up, its engine gurgling for a few seconds before coming to a stop. She knew her mother had stopped, because, beneath her, all sound and movement stopped, as though her mother had suddenly frozen up. The house was so quiet that Clara could hear the dangling of her father’s keys as they unlocked the door, could almost feel her father’s breath stop as he entered the house to find his wife staring at him.
“You’re late,” her mother said.
“...Yes. There was a storm,” her father said, hesitant. “Why?”
“Don’t give me that bullshit about a storm,” her mother said, angrily. “I don’t know where you were, but you sure as hell weren’t late three days in a row with that same excuse.”
“It’s not an excuse, Jill,” he said. Clara could imagine his face, scruffy and surprised, unsure what to say. “Why are you so insistent that I’m lying to you?”
“I’ve lived with you for eleven years,” her mother said. “And I can notice that something’s changed.”
“You’re just being paranoid, Jill.”
At that, Clara’s mother let loose. Swear-decorated sentences flew about the house for several minutes, and she stomped as she spoke, rattling the whole house stronger than the storm outside. After a while, she slowed down, gradually coming to a stop. Her father’s voice began to speak again in its careful, defensive tone, when suddenly, there was the sound of a shattering plate.
Clara jumped. Someone must have thrown that. It wasn’t unusual for her mother and father to argue, but it had never gotten to this. In search of comfort, she reached for Max, but he seemed frozen, his body quivering with fear. The rumbling of the storm had already put him on edge, and the plate had seemed to do something strange to him. He stood there for a few seconds, petrified. Beneath them, another plate shattered, and with a sudden yelp, Max darted down the stairs and out the door, which Clara’s father must have left open.
“No, Max!” she yelled, but he was gone.
She sighed. She didn’t want to go downstairs, didn’t want to see the shattered plate or her mother and father in their argument, or feel their eyes on her. But Max couldn’t be out there. The storms drove him wild; he seemed to mistake the thunder for growling, the storm as another dog. Left out there, he would likely run out in the way of some cars.
She took a deep breath and, without raising her eyes, ran downstairs and sprinted out into the street.
The second she stepped out of her door, though, she froze, her breath leaving her. The sky above was splintering; the crack, which had been just a small vein that morning, now yawned its dark mouth through the sky. Bits of debris chipped away as it opened, little shards tumbling to the ground.
Part of her wanted to sit down on the ground and watch the sky open, unfold over the city. But she had to get Max from the yard, or else he’d be caught in those falling bits of sky.
“Max! Here, Max!” She yelled into the storm. It was dark, and the dog seemed nowhere in sight. No one was on the street to help her search.
After a while of running around and repeating his name, she sat down, looking up toward the sky. What would they do when it was gone? She hadn’t thought about this, but now that she considered it, she found no answer. They could build a new one, perhaps, out of glass or plastic. Maybe they could build a mirror up there, so we could look up and see the world peering back at us, see the swarms of people walking and dancing through the world. But she doubted it could be as good as the old one. She had always loved this sky, if not very consciously. She could recall moments years ago when she and her father had gone out before it, walking together and marvelling at it. No sky could replace this one.
Nearby, she heard the sound of Max’s howling. She called for him again, and he emerged from the dim street before her, coming to her side. Taking his soft body in her arms, she headed home.
When she came back to her doorstep, however, she did not feel as though she wanted to go in. The usual comfort she found in seeing her home seemed to be faltering. No, she did not want to enter, did not want to be around her mother. Instead, she wanted to wander back out, glimpse the crack again. She wanted to bid the sky farewell.
So, upon opening the door, she let Max back in, made sure he wasn’t trying to run again, and then went back out to the storm. Behind her, her mother’s yelling could still be heard from behind the door. She could no longer hear her father protesting. She could imagine him, sitting still in his chair, watching his wife storm through the house. Clara was glad she was gone.
She strolled through the street, staring up at the sky. After walking for a while, she sat down on the grass of someone’s lawn, staring up at the Shattering.
She sighed. Somewhere inside her, she wished she had someone to share this moment with. This part of her imagined them all, her mother, father, Max, and her, sitting before the deconstructing sky, all holding each other, talking and laughing as the pieces tumbled down. No, she thought. It’s silly to think about that. Something like that hadn’t happened for years. No, she should enjoy this moment for herself.
The thunder was getting louder and louder up there, and she could see the largest cracks so far forming around the sky. These fissures had taken up almost the entire sky now; it wasn’t long before they got all the way around it, and when that happened, the entire thing would surely topple.
Goodbye, sky, she thought to herself. She would miss it, miss its warm summer grin and its pretty, dreamlike sunsets. She figured she had taken it for granted for all these years, like a distant friend that one never really notices, but whose presence one still subconsciously relies on. She felt sorry for that. Of course, she’d still have a few pictures to remind her of what it once looked like, but it wouldn’t be the same as seeing it up there.
In the distance, she suddenly heard a voice calling for her.
“Clara!” It yelled, muffled by the mumbling thunder above. Still, she could recognize it as her father’s voice. She sat still, pretending not to hear it. She didn’t want to be taken back, and besides, the most beautiful part was coming. There, far above her, one panel of the sky seemed to detach slowly, peeling away like a scab from the sky.
“Clara! Where are you?” The voice yelled, somewhere closer to her. “Clara, come home. Your mother and I are searching for you.” There was a pause, and she thought she heard footsteps a little ways behind her. “Clara, please.” She took a breath. “It’ll be alright now.”
Above her, the sky shattered, its millions of small shards finally breaking apart over the world. It was as beautiful, she decided, as a thousand snow-globes shattering.
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Daniel Blokh is a 14-year-old creative writer living in Birmingham, Alabama. He wants Avery to give him his accordion back.