30 Day Picture Prompt Challenge

Enochlophobia

Crowds. Hordes.
Like bridges, there's no place
to run when disaster strikes.
Mob running, traction on bodies.
Instinctual urge to flee
obliterates decency,
manners. Individual panic
supersedes all else.

Small theater,
claustrophobic nightmare.
Brilliant flash
burns eyes to blindness.
Balcony partially collapses,
crushing, encapsulating within
the narrow seats.

The keening,
reverberates a lifetime later.
Immense pressure squeezing
air from dust-choked lungs.
Something warm slid along
the floor. I was so cold.

Another, smaller explosion,
muffled by debris, bodies.
Velvet seats steel hard,
sharp with protruding shards
of fractured bone, wood,
piercing screams. I thought
sixteen was too young to die.

Stranger with impossibly white-blond hair,
the perfect features, the wide, wide
Kerry green eyes was shorter than I,
couldn't see over, around
the man in front of her.
In the dark, smoky ruins
I could see her staring blankly
at me. We'd switched seats.

Crowds. Hordes.
Like tunnels, there's no place
to run when disaster strikes.
Mob running, traction on bodies.
Instinctual urge to flee
obliterates decency,
manners. Individual panic
supersedes all else.

My narrow viewpoint expanded
after what happened in Boston.
TV video evaporated air from room,
I couldn't move, couldn't breathe
a thousand mile away. All I
could think was my brother's name.
He was always there. Crowds
never bothered him.

On the phone, after,
he didn't talk about
the bombing, the lock-downs,
the terrorists. He spoke of
a hundred different kindnesses.
Words, actions, hugs. A coming together.
Boston, he said, felt even more small town
than it usually did.

I still avoid huge crowds,
if I can. The press of bodies
turns me into frozen ice
that bends not; only shatters:
shards from long ago still
reverberate, pinning me
to outer edges. There is
air at the edges. A chance
of escape.






295 words