Lake of Fire

Flying east in a small turboprop seventeen thousand feet over the Pennsylvania countryside I peer out my window and find myself visually confused as to what I saw. The horizon was different. At first, I thought I saw the glow of a distant cities’ light pollution. Sodium vapor lights diffusing into the night sky; a common view from an airplane window. A moment passes. The thin crimson disk I saw sitting on the edge of the horizon appeared to be a part of the actual landscape. A thin sliver of the most vibrant red I have ever seen in nature. I realize this wasn’t a city, town, or some other typical high altitude spectacle. It was the very moment the suns rays started to refract around my specific longitude's focal point and appeared to be their strongest. As soon as the event started to occur, it was all ready over. The visual became easily identifiable as a sunrise. For what could have been an entire second, the red side of the light spectrum existed independently as the first sign of dawn. The moment fleeted from my view as the earth rotated its dark side into the sun and the brilliant red was diluted by the increasing amount of light and the rest of the visible spectrum. It was a lake of fire.