Her hands curled around the broken bits of things; she sifted through the wreckage with her limbs like a child doing a snow angel, occasionally, wiping bloody tears from her cheeks, coughing out brickdust and wallboard from the bottom of her lungs.
Everything hurt.
When the world stopped spinning and she imagined she could hear the world around her rather than some throbbing echo, some aftershock of deafening that manifested as a white-noise ringing, she sat up and dared to look around.
She spit blood and took in the devastation, watching dust and snow and furniture foam fluff and down and other whatnot dance around in eddys created by everything collapsing on itself.
This is as good a beginning as any, she thought. Might as well start now.
She got up, nodding to herself, and was both surprised and frightened that she couldn’t see any bodies.
She knew, somewhere in a more broken part of herself that no longer wept for loss, that it was only a matter of time.
