PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

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Calista ran from the house, her two year bawling, hungry, wanting to be fed. It was not the loud rumbling beneath the house and outside that alerted the mother to someing awry outside. It was the tv new interrupted suddenly with the Civil Defense message to take cover.

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There was not tornadic activity or rain, no darkened skies overhead all morning. Calista, the curious one, pushed beyond the hole filled ragged screen door to see for herself.

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The sky was red. What made it red? She scanned beyond tree lines and rooftops, turning until the dark vertical cloud brought her to a hault. They had finally unloosed nukes was her first though. Run was her second, but run where? Clouds seemed to scatter and flow away from the center of things high and usually gentle, occasionally blustery; now distraught and fleeing. No artist could capture the boiling concentrics trundling closer form hundrs of miles out. The sound began low and growling cascading.

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Calista looked down at the suddenly calm baby Josie who seemed to realize they were at the end of everything and food was the least consern now. Tears fell. The body trembled so violently that Calista did not see the neighborhood filling with those like her who were curious. Screaming. There was screaming all around her.

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Sudden is a relative term, but ther was no time to summon fear to full force. Fall out. Winds pushed her against the porch as scales of some shored off cloud fell like snow and whirled about her like deadly dancers on a stage that had been thought closed for centuries. Who had begun the carnage? Did it matter any more?

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Death came more slowly than expected. The first to go was batteries, electricity, communications. As the skin bubbled and, more suseptible, babies died, the hair began to fall off. Sitting beside the little grave in the permanent dusk, Calista considered God and family, her childhood and death everywhere. No one came to help. The sky turned grayer. 

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Heat became fire and she toppled like a sapling cut with a sharp axe. Face in ash, she thought dust to dust, but the world had grown tired of humans and would eventually return as something new, more vital, life perhaps, perhaps not. What had been done would alter Earth's evolution, the only certainty, no human would survive to see.

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Lady A

03-05-18

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