Close your eyes. You’re sitting on a beach, in a park, on a lake. There are trees on the grass behind you, palm trees...No, willow trees.

It is a sunny day, the sky is blue. A vibrant blue. You are alone in the park, and you are wearing a blotchy red dress, your hair tied behind you in a long braid with a white sun hat on your head.

Across the lake you can see a city, a very modern and clean city. Skyscrapers with angled tops in new and interesting shapes. The white city standing out against the blue sky. You hold a round tube of metal in your hand, rolling it through your fingers you contemplate the meaning of your life. Where are you going, where have you come from, what choices and events brought you to this beach on this lake with this bit of metal?

What is your bit of metal, what is it for? Do you know? Do you even want to know? Or do you want to forget? To wipe out the past, to make new choices, better choices, to be somewhere anywhere other than this beach? Or do you like it here?

Do you want to sit here for awhile, wait until it’s dark and watch the fireworks, maybe?

You don’t wait. Turning the tube in your hand you push in the rubber at the end. It takes a minute but soon the show starts one of the building’s towards the water in a plume of smoke. Then a few more slowly giving up their place in the sky. A moment later the shock wave hits you, knock- ing your hat off your head. You reach for it, but it has floated away, landing in the water as ripples push it back towards the shore.

Most of the tall buildings have fallen now, and you can see flames on the sides of the smaller ones. You can hear screams floating across the lake with the waves now lapping at your feet.

You retrieve your hat and sit long into the night, watching what is left of the city desperately hold onto this world. You sit there until long after the last scream has faded, then you stand up. Taking off your hat, you lay it on the sand and walk off to wherever it is you are going.