This year I’m participating in my very first Flash Fiction Battle, hosted by Michael R Kiel
(Find out more about Flash Fictions here!)
My picture cue was this one:
And I was assigned: Sudden Fiction (100 to a max of 750 words)
Here's my Flash Fiction below, for a total of 565 words!
***
The Silver Assassin
They say that the day the Goddess finally meets her eternal consort, the day the moon touches the earth, is the day the world will end.
In my generation, the villagers have watched with dread as the silver orb inched ever so near, day after day, like a silent assassin.
It’s getting closer now, everyone can feel it. Most people have taken the matter in their own hands, foolishly believing it gives them control.
Mothers smothering their babies in their sleep.
Lovers jumping off cliffs, their hands tightly clasped together.
Old friends pouring each other poisoned mead in a final toast.
I heard my parents talk about painless ways to put my brother and I to sleep.
But I, I haven’t wanted to die before my time. I’ve looked at the face of the Goddess with awe and I’ve imagined her smiling back at me.
I’ve wanted to know. I’ve wondered how it would happen. Would we all vanish in a puff of smoke? Would we all drop dead in unison?
I’ve wondered if this was all a ploy by the fearsome Goddess. To weed off the weak and carry the strong ones to a glorious land. I wanted to believe she had a plan for us. That this wasn’t it. That my existence had a greater purpose. That she would reward my faith in her mercy.
I climbed up to the highest cave to welcome her, wanting to reach out to her, to beg her to take me with her.
But the closer I’ve got, the harder it’s been to breathe, until it felt impossible to move. I knew moments before I collapsed that the Goddess was angry with me. That I wasn’t deserving of following her anywhere. That this was it after all.
I’ve always been too inquisitive. I’ve always asked too many questions. My parents always said that children should learn to accept the way things are. That my curiosity would kill me.
I guess, in this instance, they were right.
***
The professor reached out for the next paper on the pile, tired by hours of marking his students’ essays. He read the first few lines of the first paragraph with a yawn:
In 300 B.C., the world witnessed an unprecedented astrological alignment, which saw one of the earth moons, Kali, orbit dangerously close to our planet’s atmosphere.
Recent excavations have shown that this event annihilated every form of life in the area nearest that point (a radius of seventy million square kilometres, the equivalent of the entire south American continent today).
Carvings found on cave walls and reconstructed pottery suggest that the inhabitants of these lands revered the moon as supreme entity, a Goddess, as it is often depicted in the form of a silver woman towering over the earth.
We suspect that most people would have died of radiation poisoning almost instantaneously, as the moon reached the narrowest point of its orbit.
Archeologists have uncovered the remains of a small child, supposedly female, fossilised in the stone of a cave in modern Peru. The remains of the girl have helped elucidate much of the mysteries that remained unanswered for that dark period of history. Archeologists have named her ‘Aki Chuna Ji’, the Chosen One.