I Watched the World End From My Mother’s Balcony
The last sunrise was pale and unconvincing, like a whisper trying to be a scream.
It was just after five in the morning when the emergency alert flashed across my phone. I already knew. We all did. The air had been different for weeks — thinner, quieter, too still. The birds stopped coming. The city began to empty itself of sound. And somewhere beneath my ribs, my bones had started to hum with a kind of grief I didn’t have words for.
