Apr 24, 2011 23:15
Guys, this gal is B-O-R-E-D.
So to pass the time, give me a "first line", anything you want, and I will write you a short story in accompaniment.
Weird or witty, peculiar or philosophical, whatever you want.
writing
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There were no nuclear bombs screaming down from above, no return from a vengeful God, nothing but an unusually muggy day and clear skies above; if it hadn’t ended the way it had, it would have been almost anti-climactic. At 3:39, Tuesday afternoon, everyone died.
A woman holding a shopping bag in one arm and her car keys in the other fell bonelessly to the ground; a man on his way to work slumped onto the sidewalk, his body already cooling. There should have been a sudden, eerie silence, but the cars that were running at the time kept running, rushing into each other headlong with shrieks, like metal hawks colliding mid-air. Televisions continued babbling with frenetic energy and radios blasted out their melodies to empty ears. After a few years, the sounds stopped as machinery without any maintenance or oil to soothe it ground to a slow halt. If there was one thing that the end of the world did, it showed that perpetual motion was a myth.
One would think that the bodies would have decomposed, but they stayed where they lay, perfect and pristine as if they were sleeping without breath or dream. If anyone had been alive, there probably would have been debates about whether it was some kind of disease, something in the atmosphere, and always there would have been a crackpot on the television screaming that it was aliens with their newfangled technology-it’s a small comfort to know that no one had to deal with that, at least.
Peaceful is a relative term. When people ask for peace, it’s doubtful they mean this oddly ongoing world, filled with sleeping corpses, but a hollow land is its own kind of peace. No one said a terrible word to one another, because no one spoke at all. No one cried to sleep at night, because there was no sleep to be found. If anything, this was more like peace than not having war at all.
The scientists turned out to be wrong, by the way. It took much longer than they had predicted for the sun to go out. Dawn rose steadily on each day, until one day, it didn’t. The night came and stayed and never left. All the stars had packed up and moved on, all the light bulbs had long burnt out and shattered under the weight of millennia. Everything turned black overnight and stayed that way.
I sometimes wonder if Heaven looked something like this. Like I said, it was peaceful, in its own, strange way. There was nothing of the usual dread that comes with darkness, because everything else had died and the world was as barren as it left. My groceries had rotted and turned into dust, along with the keys that I had been clutching in my hand.
If I could move my limbs, I would walk around and see what else had changed.
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