Sunburned

  Everything felt wrong. To be honest, at that time in my life everything felt wrong, pretty much all the time. But that morning when I woke up, and started my routine, everything felt very very wrong. I felt like a trapped animal. I dressed, ate, and went to work, feeling trapped, desperately wanting to run. I didn't even know where, I just wanted to run.

  I grew up in a society that did not believe in God. Some people did, in the dark times of their lives. But looking back, those dark times were not dark at all. They were so bright all those very many people were blinded to reality.

  And then one day God touched our lives. All of us. Acts of God. That had such weak significance before. A hurricane. A flood. A tornado, earthquake, tsunami. A few cities wiped out. Here and there. A few lives, a few hundred. A couple of hundred thousands.

  The sun reached out, as surely as if it had hands.  For the first few days it was brilliant multicoloured aurorae lighting the sky, massive cascading patterns pulsating. When you grow up watching fireworks, you get trained to expect the beauty to cessate after a bit. These 'Northern Lights' draped the entire visible sky. At night it was as bright as day. During the day, you could still see shifting colours through the bright sky.

  Then the third day, the phones and power were affected. they flickered on and off, surging like crazy. That night, the lights wouldn't turn off.

  The morning of the fourth day, our cities lit on fire. Metal burned to the touch. Cellphones shocked their users. It happened so fast. The only people that got away were the lucky ones on the outskirts.

  Cars and homes exploded. The cities got so hot the streets turned to glass, and buildings melted. The sky filled with dark ash.

  We fled into the wilds. Anywhere we had been, with our electricity, and our paper houses, and our containers full of flammable products, burned and exploded, and killed nearly all of us. We tore off our clothing with metal buttons, and fled naked into the bushes like animals.

  We were reduced to our basest elements. And we watched our entire lives, our entire world, burn to ashes around us.

  But that wasn't the worst of it. The storm did not abate. On the fifth or sixth day, we could not tell because the sky was black velvet with the ashes of our loved ones and our old lives. But we heard the wind rise and howl, and the earth beneath us suddenly shifted and tilted as though the earth was trying to shake us off its skin. And some days later when the sky cleared enough to see, the sun rose and set in a different place.

  The aurora slowly dissipated, the storm, God's great cleansing, ended. And we were savage.