Love
Love and Legs
The Autumn air was crisp and leaves blew around my feet. I had been coming to this spot at a ranch in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains for twelve years now. Since eighteen my whole life had been about writing. I took to it my senior year of high school and pursued the pages as an outlet for my problems and dreams. Then I started to write fiction and my career took off. The beautiful river that flowed through the ranch property made for a great remedy for writer's block and a good way to clear my head. It's funny, for so long my escape has been my books. Now my own book was coming to and end.
By Bethani Sparvel5 years ago in Fiction
Sasha
Kandiran was a simple, yet well-organized city located in the only island, following the Final Day. Since the beginning every citizen was implanted on the back of their neck a heart-shaped locket chip that will only open when true love was found. The locket was also a way to find understanding and unity among the survivors. The founders of the new city created the locket to bring people together and make them more in tuned with their fellow humans and mother nature “we ought to learn from the destruction of the old world” they said. Then they started organizing the new world based on open and closed lockets, houses were built by those who found their love and small apartments to those who were still in the search. Nonetheless having a closed locket was not seem like singleness, but openness to opportunities and interactions among closed and open lockets were part of a regular day in the city. It was not rare to find two open lockets opening a third or a fourth one. Sometimes a locket was opened by interacting with a tree or a dog, or a book. Lockets also changed color expressing what was felt during an interaction. Was not atypical to witness an argument followed by the opening of the lockets of those involved in it, like it was not unusual for open lockets to closed out on each other.
By Jordan Cruz5 years ago in Fiction
Lover's Pit
Lover’s Pit by Pravinesh Chand She was the next person to enter the pit this morning. Arathi watched as the young woman below, in a long, flowing, white dress paced frantically, back and forth, back and forth. The Young Woman’s body quivered head to toe, her shoulders stiffened, her breath abated. The Young Woman was terrified, an unfamiliar response to the Remaining. Puzzled by the woman’s behavior, Arathi wondered why this woman hesitated so to offer herself to the Light.
By Pravinesh Chand5 years ago in Fiction
To Alicia
Alicia, Do you remember how it was before things fell apart? How we had a car, and a house five blocks from downtown, and we thought that we were the richest people in the world? How the streets had been paved and not cracked, and how when you walked out the door you could hug your neighbors, and they’d beam at you in the most wonderful way before you left for work? How Ms. Dee’s freshly baked bread smelled on a winter morning, and you could buy extra knowing you’d have a home to tuck it away in? How the heart of town used to bustle with people on a warm afternoon, how we could just saunter up to the ice cream parlor and talk to old Jim, who would tell us stories of traveling abroad to faraway countries like Japan and France and India? How we used to talk about traveling to those countries before settling into our careers, back when a career meant something? How young and naive we were. How foolish, I guess.
By Nicholas Lai5 years ago in Fiction
Long After Night Has Fallen
Long after night has fallen, the girl watches the light of the moon swirl and sway its pearlescent waltz about the room, its movements snakelike and vaguely forlorn, its gradations of pale color thrown by fierce gusts of desert wind blowing with abandon through the thin gray walls. Some bleak white copy of an aurora borealis undulating on her dirt floor like something in its death throes. Where the light doesn’t fall, the shadows are deep and alive, their edges aflame with shimmering moonlight but the deepest corners black and untouchable as dreamless sleep. In the makeshift and broken roof above her head she can hear a flurry of wasps moving about in their furious and unceasing revolutions; they have built a nest somewhere up there, and she knows that they will persist long after she is gone. They have already persisted after so, so many. She thinks of dying, and of taking it into her own hands.
By Jacob Hyatt5 years ago in Fiction
Ballerina Bunker
Thick fog off the mountains had too much smoke, and even with my mask on, I began to hack up a lung. I started down a different path to the bunker. Change it up so I don’t leave a trail. I pulled and tugged at the submarine latch that led to our bunker home. My stomach felt like a knife was being plunged, and it gurgled.
By C.H. Schoen5 years ago in Fiction
The Walk
Major woke that morning as he had every morning, to the screams of the sick, dying and the injured. The sky above him scorched red, a reflection of the burning seas below them. This was the thirteenth camp he'd slept in since the day it rained fire. No one saw it coming, even with all the advances in technology, scientists watching the skies. The asteroid broke up once it hit Earth's atmosphere and scattered to every continent and hit the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, setting everything a blaze that the impact didn't kill. The last six months had been just as hard as the first six days after it happened. Everyone was cut off from each other, left to their own devices to survive. Countries around the world could barely support their own citizens let alone help anyone anywhere else. As time went on it became more than apparent that help would be little to none until it was just none and they all were on their own. One did whatever was necessary in order to live to see another day.
By Gail Alston5 years ago in Fiction
