Cupcakes: Part One.
From the Gotham Gazette Online - Monday, June 01, 2009 (3pm)
The Robbinsville bridge and 3rd Street is closed between Robbinsville and Central due to an explosion at the newly developed Entertainment Mile Complex. Unknown in nature at this point, the explosion has damaged the east wing of the development where the head office is located as well as several nearby businesses including the Morrison Multiplex and Cupcakes Indoor Playcentre. Casulties are as yet to be confirmed.
According to Dan Eyles, owner of the Cold Rock Café at the complex the explosion could be heard from as far as the west side of Entertainment Mile. "We heard a loud explosion, ran outside and saw smoke coming from the other side of Amusement [sic] Mile." He also said that the police arrived almost immediately on the scene.
Around one-thirty bomb squad vehicles responded to the scene and pedestrian access was cut off.
Authorities have not yet confirmed the cause of the explosion but the public is being urged to remain calm.
Part One
She seems to feel the sound before she hears it - sensations reverberating through the ground and up against the walls and then it comes, so loud and all encompassing that you don’t really hear it at all. We’re not made to hear sounds like that - it’s not what we’re built for. The force, it feels as if it’s the force of the sound itself, throws her against the wall. Something cracks beneath her - bones, perhaps and the pain is the only thing louder than the sound - and she has time only to think - Adhra?
The rain is pouring down so fast that the wipers of the car can’t hope to win this fight. The lights from the cars speeding past seem brighter than usual, like spotlights, blinding. People are agitated; horns blare, and cars that should be slowing down speed up instead. Kara is eight again and there she sits in the backseat. Her mother changes gears; thick flat silver bracelets decorated with engraved elephants along the sides, they beat against each other as the gears change and as they move Kara imagines that the elephants are dancing. Kara remembers when they bought those bracelets from a vendor at the markets:
“When you turn 18 we’ll do Safari, we’ll see the real thing, in their home, Kara, we’ll see them in their home. You never know a person until you see them in their own home.”
But they weren’t people, Kara had thought. They were elephants. Even at eight she knew elephants and people were not the same thing. She knew you could see elephants at the zoo and those elephants were just as real as elephants on safari. She knew her mother had weird ideas about things, but she wasn’t old enough to think her mother had stupid ideas about things. Death intervened and her mother was saved that indignity.
The rain pours down and Kara is eight again and the elephants dance and she feels, suddenly, a little as if she’s floating. The pain is there but it isn’t there. She’s floating in and out as slowly as the elephants dance.
It’s raining, it’s pouring the old man is snoring.
He bumped his head and went to bed. And wouldn’t get up in the morning.
She starts to laugh. The pain, she realises, is in her leg. It’s overwhelming. She starts to laugh.
The tide flows out and she can hear sirens rushing past. The tide comes in and she hears crying. Out again and the sirens become louder.
“Kara.” Someone says.
And then there’s nothing.