The first sign of the end of the world wasn't fire falling from the sky or trumpets sounding from invisible angels. No, it was something much unsettlingly
It was Tuesday morning, and Dr. Mara Okoye stood in line at her favourite coffee shop in downtown Boston when the sky flickered. It wasn't thunder nor lightning. It was just a flicker, as if someone had quickly changed the channel on reality and quickly switched it back.
Everyone froze. A businessman holding a blueberry muffin muttered, "What the fuck was that?"
Mara, balancing her laptop bag and regretting her choice to wearing her old boots that squeaked with every step, looked out the window. For a brief moment, the entire city had shimmered—buildings bending like heat waves over asphalt. Then it snapped back to normal.
"Maybe the Wi-Fi is broken," Mara muttered, earning a nervous laugh from the barista. Jokes were her go-to response to trouble. And honestly? She'd rather to die laughing than screaming.
But as she finally got her coffee and stepped outside, she understood it wasn't just her imagination. Up in the sky, directly above the skyline, a slight crack shimmered like glass under pressure. It pulsed once, glowing faintly, before fading back into the morning clouds.
Mara blinked. "Well, that's not ominous at all."
A siren wailed somewhere in the distance. Then another. Car alarms started blaring as if the world itself had Goosebumps. A dog barked frantically at the sky, its tail tucked. And then—just as quickly—it was over. The city moved on.
Well, sort of.
Phones refused to update the time. Digital clocks flashed nonsense. A boy's wristwatch spun backwards, causing him to scream and toss it into the street. The large clock on the Prudential Tower froze at exactly 8:05 a.m., its hands refusing to budge.
Time, it appeared, had stopped caring about humanity's plans.
Mara took a long sip of her coffee. "Guess I won't make it to the faculty meeting."
She wasn't Scared—at least not yet. Panicking wasted energy. If the apocalypse was going to hit on a Tuesday morning before she'd even finished her caffeine, then she was going to flow with it.
People around her, however, lacked such coping skills. A woman screamed. A man knelt on the sidewalk, whispering prayers. Traffic backed up as drivers abandoned their cars, some running, others filming the crack in the sky on their phones as if it were just another viral trend, which it was.
Mara looked up again. The shimmering crack was faint now, almost lost in the clouds. But she knew what she had seen, and it looked very unnatural.
That night, the crack returned, This time it was larger.
Mara was grading papers in her cramped apartment when the windows shook as though a truck had barrelled past. The air briefly smelled like rain and metal, sharp and cold. Then the sky outside her balcony lit up—not with lightning, but with a glowing streak of silver light.
"Oh, great," Mara said. "The universe just opened its zipper."
The fissure stretched across the horizon, glowing softly, humming so low she felt it in her bones. The sound wasn't loud, but it made the hairs on her arms stand up, like she'd swallowed static electricity.
Down on the street, neighbours rushed outside in their pyjamas, pointing upward, their voices filled with fear. A kid yelled, "It's aliens!" while his mother pulled him back indoors. Someone across the street shouted it was Judgment Day. Another claimed it was a government weapon.
Mara just leaned on her balcony rail, sipping wine, because honestly, what else could she do?
She had spent most of her adult life teaching students how to question reality and think critically. But nothing in her syllabus covered "giant glowing sky crack appears, time stops working, world goes to hell."
Her phone buzzed aimlessly, trying and failing to connect to the network. When she checked the clock on her wall, the second hand was stuttering—jumping forward and then back again, as if it couldn't decide which way was correct.
"Cool, cool, cool," Mara said to no one. "So, times broken. Totally fine. Totally normal Tuesday problem."
And then came the shimmer.
The whole city seemed to breathe. Skyscrapers flickered between their modern steel forms and something older—stone towers, crumbling ruins—as if history itself was overlapping in real time. Mara blinked, and her apartment wall wasn't her wall anymore—it turned into some kind of mossy brick, then plaster again the next second.
The wine glass slipped from her hand, shattering on the balcony floor.
This was no storm. No trick of light. The world itself was falling apart.
And Mara, against all logic, laughed. Not because it was funny, but because if she didn't laugh, she'd start screaming like everyone else
.
"Guess we are all gonna die before weekend," she mumbled.
Somewhere above, the crack pulsed again—wider this time, more eager. A soft, distant sound followed, almost like a sigh. Not thunder. Not machinery. Something …..alive.
Mara's humour finally faltered. She gripped the balcony rail, staring upward as the slight fracture glowed brighter, silver veins racing across the night sky like lightning caught in glass.
The world was breaking. And whether she wanted it or not.