Falling Skyward

• Marcus Donnan, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2016

Sometimes I try to run from the sadistic laughter that is my past. That works ok sometimes. But you can't run from the present. It's right in front of you. You can't dodge it. There's just not enough time. And I don't have good enough reflexes anyway.
It started with gasps, exactly what I expect in catastrophe. My flight was headed for Turkey, so about now we were over ocean. You know that feeling in your gut when you take of from runway in the monstrous structure that is your home for the next few hours. That feeling when the plane lifts from the front and your stomach lurches. That was currently happening, at high altitude.

The confusion was real, and the pilots surprisingly calm voice came overhead.
"Please fasten your seat belts, we are experiencing some minor turbulence"
I knew it wasn't an unusual weather pattern, the sky was blue and we were heading up. I didn't fasten my seat belt, instead I walked up the steep slant of the aisle. Using the seats the pull myself up. We were only getting steeper, and I wanted to get to the bottom of this.

I arrived at cockpit when the plane was almost vertical, screams came from below. A mass of bodies lay at what was now the bottom of the plane. Few people fastened there seat belts obviously.

I was in a shelved nook, just near the cockpit, the once vertical wall now at my feet. I yelled to the pilot. "What's going on!"

He looked back at me with a distressed look on his face, beads of sweat rolled down his forehead, the collar of his shirt was damp. "I have no idea!" He yelled over the now constant rattling filling the air. He didn't seem surprised to see me.

I attempted to peer through the cockpit window, I caught a temporary glance at what looked to me as a rip in the sky, a mesmerising black void hanging there in the pasty blue. But it was only brief, the rattling of the plane made me lose my footing. I fell, only just gripping the leathery seat.

My arms strained as I attempted to keep myself from falling. I'm not weak, but it hurt. Suddenly, I felt the weight lost from my arms. A small object floated past my face. A fork from lunch. It floated past and up into the cockpit, settling on the window. More small objects went past weightlessly.

A pain went into my foot, a blunt one. I looked to see a laptop. I knew exactly what happened. This 'black-hole' was sucking us in. Even I was floating up. It became strong, and people started flying past. That's when things went bad.

A shrieking sound filled the air as the front windows flew off, objects and people flew through, bits of plane flew off outside. I attempted to jump and make it to the pilotless cockpit. Things bleeped, the hole loomed. T'was over.