Not on Fire, but Burning

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She saw the impact. But Noah must have seen the object coming. From the next room, where he had been playing Monopoly by himself, he said:

“Skyler, look.”

“What.”

“Skyler, look.”

He was five years old and Skyler Wakefield had been his babysitter since she’d started college, a year ago now. In a few weeks, classes again. She was ready to declare her major. She was going to be a fiction writer, like her father. This is what she had been thinking in the moments before it happened. Like my father. Then she looked. The house, set on one of the city’s hills, had views of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands on the far side of the bay. What Skyler saw through the window confused her: A plane. But not a plane. It was too bright. Like something cosmic come at high speed through the atmosphere, a star falling in broad daylight, but now decelerating strangely, like a machine, as if to land in the water of the bay. Then not landing. Slowing and lifting — all of this happening very quickly — as it approached the bridge, seeming to shrug its wings like some impossible dragon, though there were no wings, and yet something, metal or fire or a bolt of electromagnetism, was severing the suspension cables; and as each red cable lashed whiplike into the air, the roadway fell by stages to the pure morning blue of the water.

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