The sky was glowing strangely. My eyes opened slowly, as if waking from a fitful sleep. My head ached, and I couldn’t remember how this had happened.

We were on the ground—except Jeremy, who had been able to brace himself against the porch railing. Scattered around us were mugs and champagne flutes. Except for us, the neighborhood was silent and deserted. Even the streetlights had shut off.

“What the fuck was that?” Jason was the first one of us four to stand.

“Guys,” Jeremy was staring at his phone. His voice trembled.

“Fireworks,” Marie suggested, dusting dirt off the seat of her jeans.

“No,” I said, pointing down the dark street. “Everything’s gone.”

“Guys,” Jeremy said again.

“Maybe there was some explosion,” Natalie said, sitting cross-legged on the lawn. “And the neighborhood lost power.”

“But our lights are still on.”

“Does anyone remember? Does anyone know?”

“No, I, I mean—”

“Hey,” Jeremy yelled. “Shut up!”

We turned toward him.

“Look at your phones,” he said, holding up his phone. “What time is it?”

I looked down and turned on the screen. I heard Natalie gasp.

“That’s impossible,” Marie said. “How could that—”

“We’re trapped,” Jason sounded close to tears. “We’re fucking trapped.”

I clicked my phone screen off and on again, as if that would fix it. But it didn’t help. The time was 11:42pm. The date was December 31st, 2020.

I clicked my phone screen off and on again, staring at the unhelpful brick now in my hand. Nothing changed.

“Wait,” I said. “Did time stop too?”

“It looks like it,” said Jeremy. “I started a stopwatch that says we’ve been standing here for at least two minutes and thirty seconds, but the clock on my phone still says 11:42.”

“And the date?” Natalie asked.

“December 31st,” Jeremy said. “2020.”

“Shit.”

“We should do something,” Marie started pacing the yard. “But what?”

“No, we should just wait,” Jeremy retorted.

“What?”

“If we’re stuck here, what’s the point?” he said. “Doing something could get us hurt or get us killed.”

“And if we just sit around, something will just magically happen?”

Jason pointed up into the sky. “We should go there.”

I followed the point of his finger. The glowing in the night sky seemed to be coming from some section of the forest down the road. The glow pulse and radiated out of the dark, like it could have been from a fire of some kind. Except, instead of being filled with a chaos of oranges and reds and yellows, the glow was flickered from one color to the next, in the order of the rainbow. Red to orange, orange to yellow, yellow to green, green to blue, and blue to violet.

“What do you think it could be?” I asked.

“It’s not from flames,” Natalie said. “Unless maybe it’s like a weird chemical fire.”

“Or it’s like a rift,” Jason said this like he was getting a kick out of our predicament. “Like a crack leading to another dimension opened up in the ground.”

“Either way,” Jeremy said. “I’m not going.”

“Why?” Marie screamed.

“I already said,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“But isn’t this dangerous?” Natalie asked.

“Yeah,” Marie said. “We have no idea what’s coming for us here, what’s going to happen to us here.”

“Exactly,” I said. “We can do something and maybe die, or sit here and probably die, too.”

“It’s all a choice,” he said, and he shrugged.

“I’d rather choose to do something,” Jason said. “I don’t think sitting here is going to change anything for us.”

We milled around in the yard for another couple of minutes like that, a chaos of voices. Jason must have been the first to notice it, because he was the first to go silent.

But, within seconds we all heard it, felt it trembling through the ground beneath our feet. Almost as one, we spun around to face the glow again, from where a great sound was rushing towards us.

It was a great, shaggy thing. At least eight feet high—at least, taller than me—and scuttling on eight legs like a tarantula. It was scurrying away from the glow, the colors of the rainbow bouncing off the brown-black fuzz that coated its body. It went straight down the street, towards the park at the end of the road. As quickly as it came, it disappeared into the dark of night.

“Let’s go,” Jason said.

“Where?”

“We can split up,” Natalie said. “I’ll go with Jason, you with Marie, and Jeremy can nap on the couch until we get back.”

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“Up to you.”