Even the street- and traffic lights were out. The darkness spread like a grape-juice stain on the carpet, as the city was hit with a blackout.Įmily followed the progression of the blackout as she peered up Broadway. Immediately after, the lights in buildings around it went out.
She wiped the tears from her blurred eyes as all the lights in the tall building blinked out. It struck the Empire State so hard, the antenna at the top of the building exploded in a flash of electrical sparks and flying debris.Įmily could hardly believe what she had just witnessed. Suddenly there was an ever-louder peal of thunder and brilliant flash of lightning. Emily’s eyes filled with tears that trickled down her cheeks. “I wish you were here, Mom,” she whispered sadly as she gazed out the window. But now, all alone with her father at work, Emily felt her mother’s loss as acutely as the day she died. Somehow they’d always found ways of making foul weather fun and exciting. She’d never been frightened of thunder when her mother was alive. But as more and more forked lightning struck its tall antenna, she wondered how much more it could take.Įmily hugged her knees to her chest to keep from trembling. Her father had once told her that the building itself worked as a giant lightning rod to protect the other buildings around it. Since her mother’s death, Emily found herself sitting there more and more often, as though it could somehow bring her closer to her mother.īut not only that from this vantage point Emily could see the top of the Empire State Building. She used to call it her “perch”: her special place to sit and watch the world moving around twenty stories below. This had always been her mother’s favorite spot. Yet, despite his warning and her promise to keep away, Emily sat in the large window seat and watched the raging storm.
There are lightning strikes all over the city, and our top-floor apartment is at particular risk.”
Do me a favor, will you? Keep away from the windows.
The city’s a madhouse because of the weather, and they need everyone on duty. “All the police have been summoned into work, honey,” he explained. She clutched her cell phone and felt guilty for lying to her father. Sitting alone in the apartment she shared with her policeman father, she never imagined that a simple thunderstorm could be this bad. Where Emily lived, in the heart of New York City, the storm was at its worst. EMILY PUT HER HAND ON THE WINDOW AND felt the glass shaking from the heavy peals of thunder cracking overhead.Īll day the radio had been reporting on the unexpected violent storms raging up and down the East Coast of the United States.
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