The Morning the Sky Broke

The harbor was restless that morning, a bruise-colored sky pressing low over Halifax. At the kitchen window, hands sunk deep in the sudsy basin, Mary found her gaze drawn again and again to the water. Ships slid past one another like hulking animals, iron against the gray light, funnels coughing smoke. The air carried the tang of salt and coal, and beneath it all was something else—an odd, metallic scent that clung too heavily, like the hush before a thunderclap.

Her husband had already gone to the shipyard, and the children were chasing each other through the parlor, their shrieks mingling with the rattling of windowpanes as a streetcar rumbled by. A thread of unease wove itself through the mother’s chest. War made everything brittle. Even the ordinary noises of Halifax seemed sharper, as though the city itself were wound too tight.

A sudden screech of metal tore across the water. The figure at the window leaned forward, squinting. Two vessels—one French, one Norwegian—drifted into each other, grinding slow and sickening. She dried her hands against her apron, frowning, when the French ship’s deck seemed to shimmer with fire. For an instant it looked almost beautiful, the way light flickered off its hull, like the ship was lit from within. Then tiny figures appeared on deck, men running, gesturing wildly.

The sound came before the sight. A deep, shuddering roar split the air, and the housewife thought at first it was the tearing open of the world itself. The window imploded, glass carving into her skin like ice. The floor lurched beneath her; the house screamed on its beams. She was hurled backward into the table, the breath crushed from her lungs.

When she clawed herself upright, the world was unrecognizable. The kitchen wall had vanished, leaving only a jagged maw framing smoke and flame. The air was filled with dust, wood splinters, screams—so many screams it was impossible to tell where they began or ended. Her ears rang, blood-hot, muting everything into a dull underwater roar.

The mother stumbled through what remained of the doorway, calling for her children. Her voice was hoarse, animal. She tripped over plaster and broken beams, her bare feet slick with something she refused to look at. When she found her daughter, the girl was crumpled beside the stairs, eyes wide and unblinking, a marionette whose strings had been cut. Her mind refused the sight, shoved it aside. Later.

Later I will see.

Her son was crying—thank God, crying—and she followed the sound, dragging him from beneath the collapsed parlor wall. His small body trembled against hers, heart pounding like a trapped bird. She held him so tightly he whimpered, but she couldn’t let go. Not yet.

Around them, the city was no longer a city but a ruin. Houses flattened like matchboxes, streets erased beneath mounds of timber and stone. Fires bloomed like monstrous flowers, staining the sky with black petals. Above it all hung a silence between the cries, a silence so vast it seemed to press down on every survivor: the silence of something irrevocable, something that had ended.

She pressed her cheek to her son’s soot-blackened hair and stared at the devastation, numbness crawling into her bones. Somewhere inside her chest, panic clawed, begging her to scream, to run, to tear at her skin. But she couldn’t. She simply held the boy and stared, knowing some part of herself had been buried in the blast, entombed with the dead.

The harbor still smoldered, and the French ship was gone. The water churned with wreckage, the bodies of sailors bobbing like broken dolls. She wondered, with sudden clarity, whether God had turned His face away, or whether He had been here, in the blast, burning as brightly as the sun.

The boy tugged at her sleeve. “Mama,” he whispered.

She blinked, looked down into his tear-streaked face, and realized she had no words for him. Only silence, only the taste of dust in her mouth, only the throb of her heartbeat, reminding her that she was alive when so many were not.

The morning had broken the sky, and everything beneath it.

This is a creative non-fiction piece that will be going in my next book of short stories