Little Black Hole

Ross W Allaire 4/4/2011 12:53:04 AM, 2/7/2013 4:18:06 AM At the height of the shopping week, the average American Information Age strip mall parking lot has a rattling, unsettling din of moving shopping cart wheels at all times. The sound moves like waves, aurally, rising and collapsing like co-mingling hives of metal bees. The ruckus is naturally dispersed with other concrete jungle staples - car engines and childs cries, cell-phones and chit chat, country music from the pickup and rap from the lowrider, spliced with car horns and door slams the mix is a constant offbeat symphony, until one cart comes closer, and yet closer A mother with two twin girls approaches her station wagon. Moms remote starter coughs the car awake. It purrs with dutiful glee. Another button, and the hatch clicks and rises. The hiss of pneumatic rails on the hatch door barely register amidst the ocean of carts and engines and cries. Mom and daughters are cool, eerily quiet, all dirty blonde. They all wear nylon peacoats in personalized colors. Mom is canary yellow, and she begins to coo to her girls as they hand her bags of produce to put in small net compartments. Mom lifts herself the variety of giant (bad) economy-sized bags and boxes and bins Daughter #1: In Royal Blue, with royal blue satin ribbons in her hair, is able to help Mom with the toilet paper package, but not much. Daughter #2 comes in the other side and helps slide the variously shaped things into place. Like Tetris. All individually wrapped, group wrapped, bulk wrapped. Daughter #2 rests her head on a makeshift pillow of paper products. All with little stickers now that boldly say PAID against an international orange background. With the things away, the hatch closed, and the girls now safely belted in the backseat, each bobbing with earbuds in, Mom makes her way to the drivers seat. Then the sky itself seems to burst, in the distance. With a peculiar black flash and a small pop, it seemed like part of the bluest, nicest part of the sky gushes open. To reveal nothing beyond. Mom ducks her head in fright. The atmosphere halfway up the horizon unzips before her, loudly, leaving a Vshaped grey and blue crack in its wake. The blue of the sky around the wound seems to darken

before it goes black with void. Just beyond the edge of the swelling V floating in the air, Mom is able to see the daytime moon, badly cut in half, eerily set against the as of yet perfect blue sky off to the west. Chunks of the moon are floating and rotating oddly in a long, straight column come right at her. Green bolts of aurora lightning fan out in all directions from the giant tear in the sky, like ice slowly shattering, then spreading out like a side-winding snake. Concussion waves, like tsunamis, seem to bump into each other as a spiraling black hole progresses down across the horizon. The sound is enough to drive several older people to the ground in heart palpitations. Everyone in the parking lot is hunched over in fright and surprise. A half-second in time has elapsed so far since the sky cracked open. The only sound on Earth is that of the atmosphere itself being drawn into the event horizon of this little black hole, just wandering along.

The black hole breaks through a high layer of stratus clouds, turning and bending them with a spinning motion. The mounting pressure ahead of the black hole forms tornados at will. Mom now sees that the zipper itself seems to be rotating, on an axis, as well as spinning at the event horizon. The black hole itself seems to disappear on its side, but for the clouds and light being sucked into it. A light orange and red corona surrounds the singularity as it begins to rip open the nearer cloudscapes, lighting up the lower cirru-nimbus clouds with red fire. They burst like firecrackers along the front end of the gravity well's center, punching open, sending purple and pink ball lightning out in every direction. The dust inside the clouds burns and scatters. Some fluffy little nimbus clouds are caught up by the tornadoes and sent spiraling down onto the ground. Other little fluffs of lightning are sucked back into the singularity, forming an electric ring around it. Aurora began to appear right there in the parking lot around a shocked populace. The din of shopping carts had already faded, then swelled in a crescendo of cries, then a tumultuous staccato of shrieks. Some were quick and panicked, and some screamed long and bloody murder. Many people were simply too stunned. Maybe only 2 seconds have passed and time has begun to slow.

Mom feels it, now. She can also feel a small, undistinguished bunch of neurons that are able be given sole jurisdiction of brain function in situations like this. These neurons spread a single message to the rest of the body. Wow. Mom, with her two backseated girls blissfully bobbing their little twin dirty blonde heads, cannot scream. In fact, she almost smiles. Moms an astrophysicist. This is wonderful. Shes beginning to realize, consciously, that there really is a small, rogue black hole about to crash into Earth. And that, from where she stands it should be a ridiculously disastrous interaction. The parking lot is a little plateau above a river valley, overlooking the next town over. Flat Valley. The zipper is getting wider because it's coming in for a landing. Right there.

The sunlight fades. As the black hole nears the ground, the surrounding clouds begin to circle it, billowing back under themselves to follow the black hole downward. Something begins to blow around on the ground ahead of it in little wisps like dust devils. But Mom realizes that the dust is people and cars, bikes and papers, trash and clothes, surely actual dust and dirt but also whatevers generally not nailed down. Another The dust devils on the ground rise up into the tornados around the singularity. Everything glints in the eclipsed sun everything is being ripped right off of the earth and thrown like a curveball. Sucked into electric tornadoes. Pieces of shrapnel and hail start to pelt the shopping mall, the cars, the people what looks like part of a truck, badly burned, flies right through the front windows of the supermarket. The entire area suddenly becomes flooded with ozone, burning the eyes of anyone outside. Mom crouches down, and part of a hot dog stand slides across the pavement, sending out a wake of sparks that showers over all of them. The cart is being dragged down into the asphalt because the black hole is lower than them. Within a few yards of this young, pretty Mom and her pretty car and little girls the hot dog stand was probably going a few hundred miles an hour. The wave of sparks crashing into the hood of their car catches the dirty blonde twins blue eyes, at once. Elsie: Screams bloody murder. Chelsea: Wide-eyed fascination.

In another half-second they emerge from the car, and Elsie runs toward Mom. Chelsea walks slowly, and her eyes begin to water from the painful ozone. Her eyes follow the trail of lunar deris in the sky across the black column where the atmosphere used to be down to the view of Flat Valley below, where chunks of earth are lifting up and spiraling ahead of the singularity. The hole itself is now fully engulfed in an amazing torrent of fire and electricity. The town is broken down into its most basic elements before being engulfed by the singularity. Everything ensnared by the beast is pulverized, set alight, and electrified as it all dives into the earth. All together. The black hole disappears beneath the crust, and a loose crater forms in its wake. It seems to move, as it's growing. Everything around them is falling in. Chelsea feels the pull of the earth itself has increased. The supermarket suddenly lurches to one side. All of the windows crack open. The asphalt near the little girl with the wide eyes begins to sink, and fall into nowhere. Mom struggles with gravity and the clinging of her other daughter to reach out. She tries to grab Chelsea. She has to keep her whole torso up just long enough to grab her. One more grab, and her hand finds Chelsea's little belt loops, and tugs for dear life. The entire weight of the atmosphere crashing down around them only adds to the gravity from the black hole itself. The family huddles together, breathing in unison, as the end nears. And as the little girls start to cry in harmony, the ripping sound fades. For a moment, the sound of earths skin being broken and twisted apart is gone. The black hole has punched through, and is now swimming in lava and magma. Times haste actually softens, and the passage of time speeds up close to normal for a full second. Mom and her pretty little girls are alone in the parking lot. Elsie said her first word a few months ago just a few parking spaces over from where theyre crouching. They all exhale in unison. This is a half-whispered, half-screamed haaaaah as they all have the same thought, there at the end. I love you. Moms fingers curl up a little on each hand, stroking the back of each daughters head. The girls are using her breasts as pillows. In the valley, an explosion of magma begins as a small, thin geyser from the craters center. It shoots high up enough that the column of empty space in the sky is behind it, as Mom looks up. The lava might even be able to leave the atmosphere, she thinks. Possibly reach the

moon, or other worlds even. Suddenly the slim torrent of yellow-hot lava seems to change directions. The hose seems to be loose. Some little blobs of lava fly in every direction. One hits the gas station up the street, and another blob takes out what's left of the supermarket. A tiny fist-sized blob flies past Mom, and she rolls her daughters onto their sides. They stretch out on the hot pavement as best they can. All three of them are in more pain than most people have ever imagined one could feel. Another fist-sized splash of white-hot magma hits Mom's SUV, and it's pushed back ten feet. As both of its pasenger-side tires pass over the edge of the sinkhole between them and the supermarket. The car teeters at the edge, and then falls into the shaking, widening crevasse. Then, miraculously, the geyser in the valley peters out. The lava it spews turns a dark red, then brown, and then black. It seems to be oil, superheated. The valley is awash with various substances, and but for the fact that they are upwind, Mom takes in the sight of this strange pimple in Earth's crust. She sees where the lava is burning the muddy sludge, and the smoke is green and yellow. She sees where the oil is starting to rush in places, plowing over the sludge to get to the lava. The smoke is black, and does not rise but settles back into the valley. Everything is settling into the valley.

A deeper variation of the ripping sound from before returns, rising from beneath them as a low cough at first. This time it is accompanied by a certain uneven vibration of the ground. Mom holds her babies tight. What amounts to a super-super-volcano punches through the crater, pushing out the dust and rock that had been sliding into it. The whole mountain chain itself seems to lift up and over itself as the crust peels away with the force of the explosion. Its like an exit wound, torn to shreds and left flapping in the wind. The edge of Flat Valley nearest the supermarket rolls up toward Mom and the girls. The craters edge remains intact at this corner, and flies 5 miles up into the air before it starts to fall back down. The volcanos magma shoots past it, hundreds of miles into the sky; a death bloom. The parking lot, and the entire world of Mom and her two daughters turns upside down, then goes dark. For a split second everything lights up orange, like the fire or the magma, and then white, like the sun. Then its all gone.