June 10, 2036 11:13 am
I guess I was waiting for the egg to at least make some sort of sound, or to open up. Make an announcement. Take me to your leader. Something.
But for the first half hour at least, exactly nothing happened. All the cars on Belle Isle Drive, the strip that wraps around the island, had stopped. A few folks bothered to park, but most stopped wherever they were in the middle of the drive and stepped outside to look above the river at whatever the hell this huge egg-shaped thing was that just squeezed itself through a huge crack in midair. There wasn’t much traffic on the drive, plus you can’t drive more than 20 miles an hour, so nobody got rear-ended that I could see. Folks just stopped and got out with their mouths wide open. Funny thing is, nobody said a word. We all just kept looking at the impossible, and wondering what was gonna happen next.
The silence is what got to you, because it was so intense. You don’t know what real silence is and the effect it can have on you until you’re standing there in the middle of no sound at all. None. Not even from the geese and other birds, and Belle Isle is full of all kind of birds in the springtime. If you’ve been to Belle Isle even just a few times, then at least one of those times you had to stop the car while a group of geese took its time waddling from one side of the drive to the other, usually headed toward the river. Sometimes you might even see a mother goose with its little chicks following along single file, which always made me smile.
Yeah, even with all the duck and goose shit you had to navigate around (I always thought their leavings looked kinda like off-color Tootsie Rolls, which made it hard for me to eat that candy anymore once I made the connection), Belle Isle was a special place. You hear everybody rave about Central Park in New York, because New York is New York which means shit is supposed to be better there. But Belle Isle was designed by the same guy, Frederick Law Olmstead, and it’s even bigger than Central Park.
But a park isn’t supposed to be dead silent like it was today. Peaceful, sure, at least in places. But not this dead silence. Then, after that first half hour I was talking about? The birds started to fly toward the egg. Not just from the island, but from everywhere. There were hundreds, then thousands of them. But as many of them as there were, there still wasn’t a sound, not even of their wings beating against the air. No screeching. Nothing. They just flew right at the egg…and then they went through it.
This lasted for nearly an hour as all these birds disappeared into that mirrored egg without making a sound and without complaint. Like they were happy to go.
Then they were gone.