This is maybe a bit grim to post here at the end but, before my ability to write returned I'd thought up what the third instalment of a series I had going would be. I apparently wrote it sometime between then and literally a month before I started Sometimes The Mountain Buries You. Writing it or maybe just finishing it was probably something I only managed to do because of a migraine just as I was regaining my ability to write.
Since cohost is where I was able to express my return to writing, as well as fuelling it with prompts, it seems appropriate to make my last bit of writing posted on here the first bit of writing I'd really done in some 6+ years. The first in this series is Morris Is Doing This Wrong, followed by Morris Is Breathing Too Hard, in which a post-apocalyptic world is truly a miserable and deathly place, where there is no sun but no night, where deer with too many eyes eat poisonous brambles while locking eyes with you, where survival is improbable. Here in the final moments is Morris Is Five Feet Away From You When It Happens...
Morris is five feet away from you when it happens.
It's not a bunker, but people are gathered behind the relative safety of crumbling concrete walls. It's not enclosed, cloth is draped across the open air between reliable sections of wall.
So it's not trustworthy. So people sleep in shifts.
Morris sleeps ten minutes at a time, so long as five people are awake and not all of them distracted by quiet conversation.
There is no night, but most folks sleep between the birdsong and the screaming birdsong. It is hard to sleep during the screaming birdsong, it is hard to want to sleep during the screaming birdsong. Morris finds it is harder to sleep when it's quiet. She can trust the sounds of things that make sounds out there, the animals that press through bushes, the birds that flutter in the air, the heavy footfalls of things unseen. It is the quiet that Morris finds dangerous.
The people here gathered for security, trusting each other in number to keep safe and warm, and trade resources. As temporary as the location was, and as temporary as this assortment of people was, they had been here several days.
Morris, hand on her axe at all times, was most often asleep when others were awake.
Morris is five feet away from you when it happens. Which is probably why you're still alive.
No one had lit a fire, but someone once had. The charred remains of snapped twigs were bundled mostly in the middle of the makeshift not-quite-shelter, surrounded by rocks in a gesture near comical to those here who’d been surviving out here long enough. Morris would find the gesture comical if she didn’t find it grim. Fires were no good, even in a bunker.
The single crack, as though the twigs were alight and were expressing an explosion of damp, was the sole warning within human perception. You feel a sharp tug on the layered collars of your shirts that rips you backwards and flat against the ground. You’ve been outside long enough to not resist in this instance, to instead flatten your limbs and stymie your breath. Your eyes are already closed, but you know the back-facing hood you wear is pulled over your head by its cloth dragging over your face.
There aren’t screams because there is no time to scream. Shattered pieces of charred wood shower the mostly interior of the mostly shelter. The world is a little darker. The world is a little colder, in the way hot hurts cold when your nerves know only the bubble of body heat cultivated by layers of clothing and staying out of the breeze.
You do your best not to breathe, your best to keep your eyes closed, and your best not to fall asleep.
In some number of hours you hear rustling. The rustling doesn’t stop. You bring your mind to a more present association with your senses and feel the nearby motion.
Morris is shimmying, flat on the ground, out of the shelter. Somewhat harder to do on your back, you follow her lead once it’s evident she hasn’t died from this decision.
Some measure of time and some thirty feet away, she stands up and shakes dirt out of her hair. Behind her and behind you, the relative safety of crumbling walls in a wide rolling forest labyrinth is gone. It’s a grey wash of void. It’s nothing in a vast nothingness. You just crawled out of what might as well be a black hole.
I'll be moving my fiction onto my personal website, patreon (free), dreamwidth, and tumblr (SFW only) where I will continue to post future fiction. Here's where all you can find me online (carrd).