The boy lies on soft grass that tickles his precious skin.

He is on his back staring at the electric blue sky when a lonely plane cuts across the perfect blue canvas and disturbs its sanctity. He raises a hand to the sky in the shape of a gun and hovers it over the moving plane. He lets off a shot with his gun fingers and the world continues moving as it always has.

Until the plane’s right turbine explodes in a cloud of fire and the sky is further putrefied by seeping black smoke that leaks from the wounded vessel. The boy cannot see the pilot’s frenzied fingers flicking useless switches in the cockpit, or the screaming children and passengers of the cabin. All he sees is the plane dip down in the sky like a man stepping off a skyscraper.

The boy sits up. The plane plummets further. It grows larger. He can see where it will crash.

He continues to stare as the hunk of metal disappears behind a giant monolith of a high-rise building and collides with the beating heart of the city. Waves of energy ripple through the ground and travel up the boy’s arms and legs. The explosion rips the very air, and the boy can only stare as the skyscraper people said would outlast even humanity crashes to the ground.

As far away as the boy is, he still hears the screams of civilians fleeing, the screech of distant burning tires, the sounds of more and more sinking buildings tumbling to the devastated ground.

He looks up to the sky as an army of birds flies from the carnage. So vast and looming it is as if a section of the night has made its way into the day and is roaming the skies in the name of war. The birds keep flying and the boy wonders where they will call home.

His gaze moves from the sky to his hands. He stares at them, first the left, then the right, then both together. He looks at the individual creases in his skin and the scars of the past and the veins of the present and the outlines of the many bones and tendons and muscles that fill his hands.

His right hand forms a gun once more and he points his fingers towards his own face. He stares as the gun approaches himself and then rests against his forehead in the spot between his harrowed eyes. The world darkens as the boy closes his eyelids and readies himself.

He feels a buzzing in his pocket. It is his mother.

‘Baby, are you okay? Baby?’

‘Yeah, yeah I’m okay,’ he says.

‘Oh, thank God.’

‘What happened?’ the boy asks.

His mother is silent for a moment. ‘You happened, baby.’

Daniel Key is from London, England. He has a MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London. He writes a poem every day, even if it’s a bad one, but he most enjoys writing short stories. His work has appeared in the Meniscus Literary Journal, Quibble Lit and is forthcoming in mojo. He has won the Cygnature Story Prize. Find him on Twitter @danielkey0.