Happily Never After

/ Liz H-H

The challenge? Write a story in exactly 6 sentences based on Denise’s one word prompt: TEXT. Visit, comment, and write & post your own on Six Sentence Stories 

The woods are not normally so still: birds whistling, squirrels crashing through piles of autumnal brush, foxes barking and screaming, the peel and crunch of deer stripping tree bark, their gyrating jaws masticating what food they can find in these sere times; all has been silenced.

Even the fighter jets that used to pass overhead are quiet, their habitual ambient white noise eerie in its absence, as if waiting — as if they were all waiting — for some signal to begin again.

I’d thought I would be safe in my hole in the hillside, inner walls reinforced with branches and lined with long grasses, a rock rolled in front of the entrance to keep out intruders with less than innocent intentions.

But winter is coming, the animals are gone, and I’m not prepared, because who would’ve imagined that a misfired automated signal on the government level could result in an echoing volley of mass destruction?

Kenny, my Survivalist buddy, had warned me that this would come, tried to teach me and despairing, gave up on me; but I’d had too much faith in humanity, or whatever we call the forces for good on this now-devastated planet.

I wish I could text him now and give him a piece of what’s left of my mind.

© Liz Husebye Hartmann (2023)

28 thoughts on “Happily Never After”

  7. Excellent build up in first sentence describing the once normal of the woods, Liz. I can hear and visualize everything. Perfect contrast with life post “event”. Chilling depiction of might be a possible future for our planet.

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  8. Whoa. No texting? This is the end of the world.
    Seriously, this story is scary scary in it’s possibility and is written so well- the details, the set up… What is more frightening, that fighter jet noise becomes white noise, or the eerie absence of it in a waiting silence?

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