Art class had just begun in our newly constructed School No. 9 in Leninakan. Our fifth grade class was on the first floor. Mr. Aydinyan was revealing the secrets of drawing an apple. With trembling hands we began sketching the three apples hugging one another that had been set upon a pedestal. I was in the second last seat of the row nearest the window. Seated at a distance of about 9-10 meters away from the pedestal, the details of the apples were not distinguishable, although it seemed that the shape of the first apple was coming together on my paper.

The minutes were reluctantly moving forward and the delicious appearance of the apples had diverted our attention elsewhere. There was still one more class to go before the end of the school day, but the bleak fog outside the window didn’t have a particularly welcoming feel and we weren’t even thinking of leaving for home.

The fog looked different that day, it was gloomy, mysterious. I don’t remember ever seeing that kind of insidious fog in Leninakan, and never would again.

The noise and deafening shaking at 11:41 a.m. would not have averted our attention had one of those apples not tumbled to the ground. Many of the students stood up stunned, with the expectation of an explanation by Mr. Ardinyan. A few, without permission, ran out of the classroom, which for some reason startled me. For about 10 seconds, I couldn’t make a decision - to run out to the hall with the other students, wait for instructions by the teacher, or continue to wait to understand what was happening. The building continued to shake with indescribable speed and frequency. I realized that in a blink of an eye, a queue had formed near the door, which transformed into a throng and then subsided. I too, barely, overcoming the challenge of the swaying floor with drunken-like steps hurried to overcome the distance of seven-eight school desks to get to the door and join my classmates in the hallway. A few steps short of reaching the other side of the threshold, I remembered I had forgotten my gradebook. Leaving the classroom and more so going home without it did not seem to be a good idea. I had a special reason to be boastful that day, since only two hours before I had gotten an excellent grade in math. It would have given my mother special joy to see it. The thought of making her happy made me stop and return to my desk, overcoming the distance of the same severn-eight desks, which took another eight-ten seconds of my time. I was near my desk. The escalating tremors had tossed my drawing book on the floor and my coloring pencils were nowhere to be seen.

At that moment, the back wall of the classroom started to slowly collapse and a hole of about a meter in diameter appeared. Since we were on the ground floor, I could see the windows of the neighboring house in the distance. The hole was growing larger quickly and was ready to swallow everything and everyone. At this point I was already firmly holding on to my brown backpack which had my gradebook with my perfect score in math marked in red ink, which made me consider crawling out of the hole. The piercing sound coming from the tremors would not stop, it had even deafened the screams of the students, the noise of everything falling out of the classroom shelves and the sound of breaking glass. A moment later, the idea of going out through the unidentified cavity in the wall dissipated, especially since no one was going out that way. It was again time to try and make a run for the door. I threw one last glance at my desk and then the door; three large steps got me to a space between two desks and just as I was instinctually flexing my muscles in preparation for a fourth step, I felt an indescribable blow to my head and everything ended… maybe started...