One-Shot Airbag (4:03 PM, 2093)

[EmeraldCityBlues]

This was a short piece I wrote a few months ago during a creative writing camp I attended at Richard Hugo House, a Seattle writing community (and an awesome place). I titled it Airbag, because it always reminds me of the song of the same name by Radiohead. The subtitle is meant to give you at least some sense of setting, although I'm kind of trying to keep the reader in the dark as to exactly what is going on. And leave some questions/comments, if you feel so inclined.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the moment before impact, spectators later reported that everything seemed to hang still- the vessel, the glass, the concrete…
Movement was nearly impossible, and there was the general feeling of treading through thick, icy water. Then everything came back into place. The rubble collided with the crowded streets like gravel hitting an anthill.
As the vessel made its union with the street, it happened again- spectators seemed to have a slow motion view of the craft flipping over frontwards, balanced, for a few milliseconds, perfectly on it’s front end, slowly rotating like the dancer in some chaotic ballet. Then slamming down on it’s back, scraping and sliding across the asphalt. In the final moments of this phenomenon there was the general feeling of a pulse, a wave of pressure bearing down on the eyes, ears and lungs.
Once the phenomenon was over, and eyes slowly and cautiously peeled open, two major revelations were made.
The first was that the vessel was gone. There had been no explosion, no great flash of light, but all that remained was a long streak of blood and broken glass along the asphalt.
The second revelation was that all digital watches in the crowd had somehow been altered. Some were turned days back, others hours ahead. Some had ceased to work at all, showing only broken symbols, fragments of real numbers.
For a while, the remaining spectators only stood there. A nervous silence had taken hold. Even now, no one was really sure what they had just seen- in a few days the digital news archives would be their only reminder. But for now they stood, strangers to each other, but united in their witnessing of an event none of them could explain.
Then, one by one, they turned, wandered off, and lived out their lives.

​

 

[Sandstone-Shadow]

Interesting. It's very short, but it does make you think. It seems like an airplane or something, given the fact that it's colliding with the street - a car is already on the street so I'm assuming that that isn't it. A few minor things:

Then slamming down on it’s back, scraping and sliding across the asphalt.

While sometimes using a sentence fragment such as this can add to the description of an event, it is the only one that you use and thus feels out of place. Also, "its" is correct in this case, not "it's." There's a case of that in the sentence preceding this one as well; if you're in doubt about which one to use, read it to yourself and replace "it's" or "its" with "it is." If "it is" makes sense, then you want "it's"; if "it is" doesn't make sense, then you want "its."

Also, work such as this online is much easier to read if you leave a blank line in between paragraphs, like I've done in this post.

 

[EmeraldCityBlues]

Thanks, I just noticed the error with "it's". Also, I realized the sentence mistake... I just wanted that sentence to be separate from the one before it, fro some reason. Guess I should have used a semicolon or something. And it's not an airplane, or a car... but that's not really the point.