By all accounts, it should have – and could have been, in another time or on another planet – a day like any other. The sun came up and the Earth flung itself around the broiling star at a break-neck 30km a second, leading to the heartwarming effect that every occupant of the planet who had been alive more than two years affectionately referred to as "daytime". That huge, sloshing orb spun itself about, frolicked with its single moon, and tossed itself about its sun with no real concern for whatever might have been happening on its surface.
Much less elsewhere.
Yet, somewhere in a small city in the Midwest section of the United States, of all places, a young woman sat casually sipping a cup of coffee from a battered old mug. It was nearing dusk by then, the sky turning all sorts of mesmerizing colors that even the most talented watercolor artist struggled to reproduce accurately, and the park she sat in had cleared out from its springtime fill of young children and their equally young and attractive parents. She had unquestionably enjoyed her afternoon of people watching, but the routines of the families that had filed in and out of the park were so predictable that she was sure by the time darkness enveloped the area that she could even read their lips accurately. It had become boring, but it was better than letting the depression and desperation of unemployment completely drag her down into its grips. It was better than listening to her cell keep making a delightfully bubbly popping sound every time her father sent her another text, demanding to know when she intended on finding another job, as if she could simply walk into any business she pleased and demand gainful employment. It was better, in almost every way, than dealing with anything else she put up with during her days.
Mind you, there were moments that she enjoyed her life, but they were relatively few and far between and they paled in comparison to the upbeat, exciting lives of her friends and former classmates. At 25 years old she was sure that she was hitting middle age already, and the fact that so many of her colleagues were married off and popping out squalling children made her feel even older. She was often updated about new teeth or the arrival of another "bundle of joy" while her updates in holiday letters consisted of finally getting to dye her normally black hair purple, or acquiring another kitten. She complained about how absolutely dead the job market was while her siblings and ex-cohorts praised their college educations and thanked whatever deities pleased them most for their steady, gainful employment. In short, the girl – a pretty but not strikingly so, pale-skinned creature whose hair boasted a sort of other-worldly curl to it and whose eyes could have been mistaken for five or six different colors – was discontent, and sitting in the park watching happy families go about their lives made it easier, sometimes, to forget what awaited her when she returned back to her quiet apartment and her content but rather unimpressed cats.
It was that very evening, as she rinsed her beloved coffee mug in a water fountain and then tucked it back into the messenger bag at her side, that she wondered how long she would have to wait before something, anything changed. Before she could brag about her life, and the wonderful and amazing and exciting things that she was somehow blessed enough to experience. So it was perhaps surprising to her when she realized that the park, despite the time, seemed to be making an almost mechanical, low buzzing sound.
She whipped around as though she fully expected to see something behind her, but as she had figured, she was alone and there was nothing there to explain the noise. I must be going insane, she bitterly thought, her brow knitting in frustration. Her fingers lifted and rubbed briefly at her ears, perhaps hoping she could invoke the noise into escaping on its own, but as she realized it surely wasn't something that her own body was creating, or that it wasn't simply some mental reaction, a side effect from too many years of overly loud dubstep, she frowned.
The streets that made the park into a corner lot held the same amount of traffic as always, a few cars here and there but nothing extraordinary. The lights had come on by then, tall, old fashioned lamps meant to look like wrought iron with glass lanterns atop lit by soft orange bulbs. The somewhat long grass swayed about in the warm, gentle breeze and the shadows of the many trees about her grew longer and darker as the sun faded away below the distant horizon. It was a night exactly like every other night she had come out to the park to enjoy watching life blossom around her, and yet there was something so desperately wrong with the whole thing that she couldn't quite put a finger on it.
The buzz grew louder.
It was almost like bees, she realized, though it sounded like it was coming from half a mile beneath her feet and as if their wings had been replaced by miniscule watch parts. It would have been oddly soothing, if it wasn't so completely out of place and inexplicable. Even being able to pinpoint a source for the sound would have made it that much more tolerable, but as her head snapped left and right and left again, each time ruling out potential causes for the low buzz, she realized that she would be afforded no such luxury. The park was nearly dark, and worst of all, the few stragglers who remained – mostly teenagers and the occasional family with older children – didn't seem to notice the noise as she had. If so, they weren't acknowledging it in a way that she could understand or ascertain, and that almost bothered her more.
Her complete distraction made being run into by two sprinting individuals even more surprising.
