The brass tongue of the east wind rasped across the Ottawa evening, driving pearls of cloud before it like startled souls. My son sat beside me, and somewhere between Conroy Road and Bank Street our headlights carved a corridor of pale gold through the darkness. Then the sky split.
For no longer than a heartbeat’s exhalation, an emerald orb, trailing sapphire fire, ripped the celestial tapestry. Imagine a stellar furnace condensed to the livid heart of a dragon’s eye—gargantuan, yet hurled with the velocity of a Perseid spear. Between the altitudes where airliners lower their wings to kiss the runway, the apparition descended southwestward until rooftops swallowed its glow. A plummeting star should herald thunder, yet the night, crystal and pitiless, produced no echo.
For three entire seconds, awe grafted paralysis to my hands on the wheel. I waited for the concussion that would comb the streets bare of silence, for sirens, for the brittle chatter of radio warnings. Nothing. Only the mundane murmur of traffic, and beyond it our two hearts ricocheting against the cage of the ordinary.
I veered onto the back road skirting Ottawa International. Radar beacons winked like iron cherubim on distant towers—Letrim military station vigilant nearby. Surely their instruments quivered at the same spectral intrusion? A pair of Airbus 320s limped home overhead, underbellies glimmering, routine as migrating geese. Yet the night withheld its confession.
No fragment slagged on tarmac, no ash sifted into gutters. Perhaps the sky, adventuresome for a moment, merely drew a match across its own face and blew the flame out. Perhaps mesospheric dragons devoured their emerald spark. Nevertheless, an after-image lingers behind my retinas—an opal wound where space itself bled color—and the memory of a wind that still carries a faint sonic surprise: the sound of imminent doom that refused to fall.
Those who scan, who sift archives of meteoric residue and classify the taxonomy of bolides, take heed. Somewhere over Ottawa, on the vernal equinox of 2004, the cosmos sighed, and something the size of a passenger jet dissolved without trace—leaving no wreckage but wonder.
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