Darkly Awake
The moment that shattered me was violent and sudden and ripped half of me away, melting the stubs of bones that jutted from blackened flesh. It was an oblivion. It swept away the city in which I lived and scored patterns into stone and flesh and the survivors rotted in their skins, some painfully over decades.
It was not the first time something so fearsome had descended to wipe out a nation but this time was different. This was no petty war over natural resources or ideologies, it was not even a conscious action. It was no declaration of war, though that is of course how it was taken.
I was 17 and had been on way home from ballet class, I had changed into comfy track bottoms and baggy tee. It was a summer day but I recall the sudden chill before obliteration. The world grew dark and then too bright, I know there were pressure waves and booming sound but I recall none of that.
I was dead, and mash for rodents but I was not allowed to remain that way. My remains where the most intact within the blast zone and so they tried to correct their mistake. They began to fix me, I floated in vats, gelatinous oozes of various colours that crept down a throat only half there. My head had remained mostly there bar my lower jaw which was smashed and had driven wedges of itself into my grey matter.
They fixed that but could not know how the connections within worked. Many things happened whilst they rebuilt me. The nations of the Earth united and fort the foe from the skies. They ripped us to shreds, not with crude nukes, but with their real weapons. In our arrogance we sealed our fate, it was not an attack, we were not worth that! What had taken my city had been nothing more than a deep sea oil spill to them.
Then as they tried to fix what they had done we attacked. And as they wiped my people out, they continued to rebuild me. I was pre-war, so I and not the children, the billions of children on Earth, was considered innocent.
It took them a long time. I had to learn to walk and to talk, I floated and the light was so dim, and they moved. Slithering over things and whispering to me. They told me how they ripped the grass to shreds with nano beetles, how millions starved or died of old injuries.
I watched my planet die through the microcosm of their stories, hissing and echoing in my newly forming mind and the anger boiled and burned but was quenched with a dream cycle and numb disbelief, until I could not know fiction from reality.
Somewhere at the back of my mind I still think maybe it isn’t so, please God let it not be so! I am mad and all those people where never harmed and are living still in the throngs of their hive cities. Manhattan and London and Nairobi, those three burn brightest in my memories but I can not tell you why, they could not grow memories back, I am sure that this is a blessing.
They set me down, back on the broken and charred world and I have been searching for someone, anyone but definitely a someone. It seems like years but I do not think it has been a complete set of seasons yet. Snow is falling and I hid within the skeleton of an office block, all bright glass and chrome, I have a fire but am numb within. I have walked the wastelands and they are dreadful, vast plans of grit swirls as the soil rips into the wind, soon there will be just stone. The whole world just stone, for they boiled our seas dry.
I am a wonderer now with nano-tech bones, I am not sure if I can die. They used to say hell was other people, I would swap that circle for this. I write this letter in hope that someone may find it and know of my existence, maybe find me. I will be heading north, there are caves there and it was sparsely populated so may have been over looked.
Until I find another living soul I am nothing but darkly awake, my heart is shut and I function through necessity. Please find me.
Posted: Thursday, February 20th, 2014 @ 10:24 am
Categories: Flash Fiction.
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