Good morning all. I am feeling particularly smug this morning. Not only did I wake up twenty minutes before the alarm went off but I actually got up instead of lazily stretching and waiting for my alarm to go off. So I feel kind of pleased with myself. Let’s see how smug translates into a morning prompt shall we?
Hmm. Not what I’d call smug, but interesting. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.
Tuesday, April 26th: Bubbles floated through the air.
Bubbles floated through the air. Harold watched them float by. First there was one then a group of three. Then a steady stream. At first he thought that someone was having fun, running around the open space behind the buildings like he remembered doing when he was small.
But the bubbles were increasing now.
‘lots of kids running around?’ he thought. But there was something not right about the bubbles. They were multiplying, the steady stream turning into large clusters that floated around the back of the building and bounced over the ground.
“Bounced,” he said. Harold’s face folded into a frown. Bubbles didn’t bounce. They burst on contact. But apparently these didn’t get the memo. They bounced lightly along the ground, clustering into corners an building giant bubble towers. The one caught in the corner between two buildings was rising almost taller than the roof line now.
‘And they should burst against the brick if nothing else,’ he thought. As Harold stood there and watched, he realized that the bubbles were shifting colors. It hadn’t caught his eye at first as he always thought of bubbles shifting their rainbow hues as the light twisted around and through them. These shifted differently. At first the shifting was random, blues, green’s, purples and yellows dominating. There was an equal number of each, or so it seemed, but as the bubbles accumulated, he saw that those that were purple in hue, were staying purple and the other colors were shifting to match, traveling their way along the spectrum until they reached purple before they two stopped shifting and stayed in the same range.
‘Pulsing,’ Harold thought. ‘Do bubbles pulse?’
As Harold stated to wonder how many non-bubble like tendencies bubbles could have before he had to come up with another name for them, he heard movement behind him. He turned and saw that he wasn’t the only one confounded by the not really bubble bubbles. Others were coming out to see what was going on.
The air was thick with them now and it was becoming difficult to see the source of them anymore.
‘They aren’t breaking,” someone said.
“They are all purple,” another added.
“Why are they pulsing.”
All things Harold thought. He was relieved to see the others noticed and it wasn’t just him. One of the others began approaching one of the bubble towers and Harold felt a quivering fear in his belly. For some reason touching the bubbles seemed like a bad idea. He backed away. As the crowd was pushing forward, his actions weren’t noticed. He slipped through the crowd, letting them wash past him as he put more and more distance between himself and the bubbles.
He reached the sidewalk when first contact was made. Harold wasn’t sure afterwards if it was the first touch that set them off or if it was just poor timing. Either way as the man’s fingers touched the bubble nearest him, it went from light lavender to deep purple. He took another step backward. The purple bubbles stopped pulsing and went to red. Thinking of the war, Harold turned away . The explosion was felt more than heard. Vibrations through the air a tremendous wave. His caution had him at the edge of the blast radius and sent him flying over thirty feet. He landed in more or less one piece. Most of the others weren’t so lucky.
Ten til Midnight 