Comet Girl
She landed in the city on the backwash of a raging comet. It hit the water just south of the Williamsburg bridge and exploded like movie premier flashbulbs. Nobody noticed, or if they did they assumed it was a promotional exercise for a celebrity perfume or the special effects from Hollywood's latest attempt to drop the apocalypse on New York. She climbed out of the water and over the concrete stoop, headed inland to where the lights were pulsating. Her bare feet left wet-moon crescents on the tarmac and a trail of drips which twinkled like traces of cubic zirconium scattering in her wake.
The girl wove through the backstreets and padded past the tall buildings, past the hawkers and laminate yellow shopfronts coated in hieroglyphics. Nobody stopped her. The streets were not empty, but there was a strange lull lying dense in the air. The late-night whee! was muted and the workers emptied lorries mechanically, passing boxes to one another like a silent conveyor belt. She stepped through them neatly with the softly-soft pad of an alley cat, brushed past their ankles and was gone. The unloading did not pause.
Somewhere in the Upper West Side of the city it began to rain dime-sized feathers of ash. They were luminescent and swirled like beatific shoals of drugged fish. A dog-walker felt one land on her arm and it tingled like the tender nibble of a lover. She screamed. The air around her shifted slightly and the feathers danced a two-step hover. The lead whipped from her hand as she threw her arms above her face, and fled.
The weather should not have been this balmy; it was February, but by the time the girl crossed Houston she was dry. Although she kept her head down, behind her bangs she was grinning. Her lips picked at a smile that held secrets like a glass bauble, perfectly polished and ripe, tucked under her skirts and wrapped safe with cotton wool.
This wasn't the first time the girl had come here, hitching a ride on an intergalactic thumbed mission. Two years ago she had catapulted into the sewer system, her arms cramped tight round the alligator who lives in urban lore. She walked around the city for weeks and waited to catch people's eyes. The homeless and the crazies yelled as she went past, called her beautiful-princess and oh-lady and baby-doll. She rewarded them with shy smiles and flushed cheeks and thought about what she was going to do. She got lonely. After a while she went home.
She hadn't planned on returning, but she changed her mind. She hadn't planned on it because the time she spent here before had drawn out long and lonesome like a heart monitor on a dying man. She changed her mind because there were also the Stat! moments, the points where everything flared up and illuminated before reclining into quiet again. During these moments she was happy, of course, but later when she turned them over in her mind they took on epic, glorious propensities far in excess of the moments themselves. So she came back. When things were normal she missed that feeling that perhaps her heart could crumble.
The decision wasn't finalized until some time after she landed. She did not return definite on causing vengeance. She was thinking about riding the subways, wondering about blowing kisses, waiting to see if somebody, somewhere, would notice.
Nobody stopped her. Nobody told her she wasn't supposed to be here and nobody agreed she was, and she walked northwards with nobody paying attention apart from the one homeless guy who echoed up Lexington Avenue, hey beautiful, hey, beautiful! and then the corners and curbs began to unravel and the subway-grill steam began to curdle.
The girl reached Times Square and climbed up the red-lit staircase. All around her the screens stretched up to the heavens and flashed a cornucopia of neon. She watched a Korean man stand, thumbs aloft, posing before advertisements. She wallowed in the colours and felt bad, for a moment. Then she peeled back the surface and pressed her fingers on the button.
Somewhere the ball dropped and the windows of the Empire State building started to peel off in the breeze like post-it notes in a stop-motion animation. They fluttered into the sky and furled out, head-over-heels, until they reached the ethers. The shell of the building squatted its shoulders and poised like a rocket, prepared for take-off. On the cross-streets people hugged their children close as the city dissolved.
The television screens turned to liquid and the stockmarket dribbled down the drains, and lumps of colour and shoe commercials and celebrity imprints floated away like bubbles in a lava lamp. The air smelled of burnt tires and permanent makers and popcorn husks. It was quieter than you would expect at the end of the world. Wide-eyed lovers held their breath and waited.
It was a gentle apocalypse. When the smoke and daggers cleared from the air, the inhabitants of the city found themselves sat on a sandy peninsula. The ground was soft and glittered, and ran through the fingers like hourglass promises. Nobody was hurt.
The sky was swirling like the Aurora Borealis, like fire and brimstone, like pink candyfloss materialising around the stick.
Somewhere around the Great Bear, a comet exploded blowing kisses at the constellations.
It was time to start again.
Bio: Jane Flett is forever flitting between Edinburgh and New York City, trying to trick the universe into letting her get away it. She has read to acclaim and whooping in Berlin, Cambridge, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and Shakespeare and Co, and was recently awarded the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Find her words in Neon, Johnny America and The Golden Hour.