Prompt: You wake up one day to find no one home, you call for your family and get no response, but a whisper of voices suddenly come from outside. You step out and see the entire town huddled around your house holding hands and chanting something.
My father was standing in the front, looking up, holding my mother’s hand, as the townsfolk behind him swayed and chanted in long, drawn out words that I couldn’t understand.
“Dad?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
He looked down at me, smiling. His glasses nearly fell from his face, held by the end of his nose. “The Opening is finally here, sport.”
“Opening? What’s that?”
“Well we were waiting until you were a little bit older, but Gary over at the science center got the UV signal about Its awakening and it was time to perform the Opening and you know how—”
“Dad!”
He shook his head. “Oh, yeah, right, sorry sport. The Opening has been a tradition passed down from generation from generation, practiced by everyone in town when they become of age. It’s when the planets have aligned perfectly and the stars have formed the Symbol of Passing, and we speak the words and chant until— Oh, look sport! It’s happening! Look up!”
I had to take a step back to see into the sky, my dad was really tall. The clouds parted, like the wind had blown them away, and the blueness of the sky melted like peeling the skin from a grape. My jaw opened as I tried to open my eyes wide enough to see everything. There were waves of yellow over deep, oily looking purple. There were black, wiggling lines twisting around a point of bright light in the middle.
The chants got louder, I couldn’t hear my dad or mom anymore. Like an eggshell, the middle cracked, sending wind whipping around us, and bright lines shot through the deep purple. Little by little, shards of them lifted into an even brighter place, and soon the entire sky was filled with light that burned my eyes, forcing me to look away. The townsfolk swaying and chanting, my family, never looked away and their eyes were all black and sizzling, but my dad was still smiling when he looked down at me with eyes smoldering like coals and said, “It’s here.”
Read my previous prompt, “My Prom Date’s Parents.”
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Micah Castle 