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"SSC32 ~ It's all gone"

Here I stand, atop the knoll by the bubbling creek; where I spent so many happy days as a child. And over to the left lies the spot where we used to come out onto the terrace and eat lunch in the humid summer months. I stand atop the grassy tussock overlooking the sweeping plains of the lush green valley, lustrous with colour and vibrant with activity.

Or rather, that's what I used to see. All that's there now is the bleak and desolate earth, charred like the path to hell itself. The landscape is barren and unyielding, even the Sun glancing off the jagged craters does nothing to enhance its appeal. Not even scrub has grown upon this desolate waste land. The house, and so many memories washed away, living only charred splinters to mark its passing.

The once frothing river, the cool clean river that soothed the body and soul as I ran screeching through it as a child has become a filthy yellow trickle, gradually staining the already scarred rocks as it oozes its way down towards the unrelenting earth.

And that river carries with it my past, my esssence, ebbing away on the stained brook, intertwined and gradually soaked through, drained of all the tender love and leaving in its place only the small yellow channel that slices through the earth.

How did it all happen? I have no idea. Oblivion was not the foretold divine miracle and there was no concrete evidence it had ever happened. All I knew was that one minute I was running down into our bomb shelter to collect a magazine I had left, eager to show my family my name in publication. I returned to see the earth smoldering and everything gone. That's what frightened me the most; massive scales of destruction, total annihilation, as far as the eye could see yet there was no sound, no disturbance, no frightened screams. The event crept across the earth and blotched the land as silently as a spider treads its silk web.

I tried to do it slightly differently, focusing on the atmosphere and setting of a post-apocalyptic landscape rather than 'Teddy ran from the fire', as has been done a million times.

Thanks for the comments and Black Glove was a deserved winner. So, yes, perhaps not my best effort but I was pleased with the atmosphere.

Can't really add much that hasn't already been said - some decent writing in here though, and yes it does feel like part of sometihng bigger, but it was never going to be easy to get apocalypse in a short.

Very evocative. I liked the mystery of it all - "no sound, no disturbance, no frightened screams" - made me want to find out more. It does seem like the beginning of an epic quest rather than a self-contained story however.

To be fair, Sleepy, I edited out the last few lines as I'd done them simply as some kind of summary to the story.

It would have been better not to have written them but I thought they might have added some moral question at the end, I couldn't quite weave it in though.

edit - To 'summarise', the last lines are not the last lines previously described.

Actually I liked the very last line. Any other comments would just be repeated all that has already been said.

The description was very nice, but I felt the story had far more potential.

As a very short story it's pretty good. The middle section has a good flow to it. The last paragraph needs to be expanded with more detail if you want the story to have more impact.

Some of the description is great but, I agree, maybe a bit more devlopment of why it happened would have been nice, not essential, but it felt a bit empty to me.

Clazon wrote:
> the middle was fantastic.

The title is awful.

The final line is awful.

You neglected to pick up on a way of how it happened.



Which is all such a shame, because I thought the middle was fantastic.