Broken Sky 3

I'm sorry.

I don't even know what I'm sorry for.

After it happened, after the sky broke, I couldn't stand being indoors, where it was crowded and suffocating and terribly loud because everyone kept trying to drown out the noise. I couldn't stand being outside either, where I could see that wound in the sky and hear that noise under the bewildered birds and animals crashing through the trees because they couldn't judge distance anymore. In and out and in and out and - he doesn't remember, I think. The way he doesn't remember running out into the ocean where the current's most dangerous, because he heard something in the noise.

I don't know whether he was running toward something or away. Maybe he never knew either.

Afterward, on the mainland, I still couldn't stand being indoors or outdoors. I kept thinking I'd get used to it, the noise and the suffocating feeling, and I never have. Not even now. That stuff took everything, my family and their families and everyone's family, and I didn't really take to religion, the way they thought.

I took to damning God, and maybe it'd have been easier to take to drink or drown myself in science. I'd wander around the streets hurling curses at God for letting this happen, for drunkenly breaking the sky and ruining everything like this, things like that. I don't remember them all - maybe I was mad. Maybe I still - no. No, I won't start again.

It wasn't a vision, or voices; no angels descended or anything like that, no heavenly trumpets. As it was I really did go home and get very drunk on whiskey, and refused to tell them why.

I'm a coward. I never really thought so before, but I am - I looked at this thing, and I ran away. I tried to wrench my mind around, convince myself I was going mad, that I didn't know what I knew - that's what it was, just knowing, the way you know the sun comes up in the morning and that water is wet.

Then he started fading - I guessed first, the way his face smoothed out, no more fear and worry and grief in it, even though he felt it all still. And I was more afraid of that than the other thing. I don't want to see him die, either of them. I don't want to be alone.

So I - I'm doing this to him. To them. Because I'm more afraid of seeing them die than dying myself, than of being mad.