Bad Nuclear Bomb Writing 101

We were on the Belmar boardwalk, kissing, when it happened.

At first it was a flash, like the post second blink of a sun stare, then the sensation of waiting for your eyes to adjust from dark to light.

A 3-ton fishing boat whistled by my head, its occupants cascading along its side like birds circling a kill. They were all on fire. I think I heard screams. It happened so fast. It was hard to hear.

The calm, soothing summer night fog flashed into to a seething, skin-blistering sauna, and the immediate sea evaporated into steam, revealing an ocean bottom cooking and twisting with near-dead life. Skin begins to drip off our bones like melting popsicle. An eyeball blink, and our fate is gooey.

Within this span of two seconds, all beach sand melted, curled, and shattered into a hailing curtain of sailing, sharp shards of razor glass, whipped into an amazingly fast frontal force of hideously charred surfers, sunbathers and seagulls on fire. A tornado of limbs, splinters and breath taking suffocation.

We looked toward each other, still mid-kiss. The metal pipe fence that served as a leaning point from boardwalk to beach was molten and unstable. The paint on our bench peeled and our skin turned into firey tissue, our muscle to melting mystery and memory.

The molten fence piping broke loose and that’s when the blast wave hit.

(With a heavy nod toward the Douglas Coupland book Life After God)

I tried to pull her down, but we were one foot too far above sea level, hence, well within the screaming latitude realm nuclear shot gun debris.

The fence pipe hit us and we died together, technically, of blunt head trauma. Our atoms went with the wind.