Deserted
You’re alone.
Deserted by your “friends”. You know why they left you. It
was your shadiness and generally bad sense of humor that consisted only of puns
and pointing at things and saying “meme that”. But you’re still surprised they
had the nerve to do it today, after all, it was your birthday. Every present
you thought you wanted seemed irrelevant, because only survival was on your
mind.
It was just that morning you had woken up and discovered
everyone was gone. The campsite was abandoned. Everything was taken. No food.
No water. They were even petty enough to take the ashes from the fire you made
for the night.
You meandered about for a couple of hours, in search for a
cactus or oasis or something bearing life or hope or anything in between. But
you gave up because it was a waste of energy. Now, the arid desert wind brings
dust into your eyes and lungs and you cough. You can feel your throat and mouth
drying up on the spot and you know you need water.
You decide to wait until nightfall so you can follow the
stars somewhere. And when the dark calmness of the night takes over you set out
following a random star.
But perhaps it wasn’t entirely random because after only
just an hour following it, you stumble upon a town. Or something that seems
like a town. The closer you got, the more skeptical you became that people
willingly lived in it.
There was a tall barbed wire fence around it that either
served as a bizarre Christmas decoration or was an attempt to keep out nosy
tourists. Yet again who would be on a tour in the middle of a bloody desert??
What would the tour guide even say??
“And over to the left we see, oh guess what, MORE SAND!
SURPRISE!”
If the goal of the fence was to keep people out it was doing
a bad job because it had a wide open gate on one side which you entered the
village through. It seemed eerily abandoned. The short wooden houses were
falling apart, the paint was peeling off in places, there were no roads, no
power lines. It looked uninhabited. Unwelcoming.
Yet you continued walking between the houses searching for
any sign of life. You turned the corner and bumped into someone you thought you
would never see again.
“Ah, so you made it.” Said one of the friends that abandoned
you. “We knew you would make it.” And with those words the ground parted under
you and the darkness of what laid beneath swallowed you whole. You were
definitely not alone.
Hmm, this was interesting to read and really captured my attention. It seems like it could possibility make a great horror movie. Being abandoned and left alone may be the scariest of all though.
ReplyDeleteI could be completely off base here but before reading Sam's comment I had the impression that this entire post was a super deep metaphor of your mental state or your emotions associated with a particular event. In any case, it was quite a moving piece and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The lack of context and disorienting setting adds to the mystery. Great job.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post. I also thought that it was something personal at the beginning but it turned into an interesting story. I like how you went right into the topic of the post instead of messing around with the backstory. It really helped the subject of this post into the spotlight.
ReplyDeleteThis post is really cool. I like your images, and the ending is really striking, especially when compared to the beginning (You're alone vs. you were definitely not alone). I'll have to grapple with the meaning for a while, but I like this a lot and the style is refreshing.
ReplyDeleteI was confused at first because I thought it was a fictional story but then you talked about losing all of your friends due to your puns so I knew it was non-fiction (jk). Overall, I liked the setting and idea of the post and I would like to see it expanded because it was very intriguing and raised a lot of questions in my mind, like what the friends were doing at the end, what role the town will play, and how the ground can suddenly swallow someone whole (another joke).
ReplyDeleteJust as Xanthe said, I will have to grapple with the hidden meaning of this for a while (I'm convinced there is one, if not you did a good job of making it seem like there is), but I do know that I love the voice. It is so calm and refreshing (unlike the setting) and I feel like I'm being told a story out loud. Nice post!
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