I am seated outside at a picnic table with my parents behind an unfamiliar barn that is apparently ours. It looks out to a field and some woods beyond. As we converse, we keep hearing a strange noise that we cannot place—a sporadic but enormous cracking sound. We inspect the barn, poke around the property here and there but cannot locate its source.

My father proudly states that the barn is so very sturdy because its boards are held together by its ancient years.

Some change in the overall light causes me to look up, and I notice for the first time how strange the sky looks. It is not the normal atmospheric azure. Instead, above our heads, the entire sky is one block of frozen ice. What is worse, it seems to be in the process of melting causing water to fall from the sky as if from stadium-sized buckets. Even worse than that, enormous chunks of ice are also beginning to fall as it all breaks apart.

We run to the trees for cover as cacophonous godlike cracking noises reverberate presumably across the entire world.