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Showing results for tags 'FFF Contest'.
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-Prelude to Darkness- He stood silently, his face a mask of impassivity, watching motionlessly as the golden orb of light sluggishly sunk behind distant rolling hills. The shadows seemed to whisper dark, cruel promises of pain to him, as the crept from the undersides of objects, shades of life born again in darkness. Warmth had turned to cold, happiness to sorrow, dinner jackets and tuxedos to sackcloth and rags, riches to poverty. His cigarette butt glowed, incandescent. The smoke curled from the tips of his mouth as he breathed, inhaling and then exhaling death. All was silent, all was in cloaked in the abyssal shadows. The hand grasping the bottle shook slightly, tremors of uncertainty, barely contained fear of the unknown seeping through a façade of dispassion. The vodka inside sloshed around, the lapping of waves against cliffs of glass. No tears fell, no strangled cry broke the silence. He inhaled. He exhaled. The gray, smoke lazily swirled skywards, reaching towards the crescent moon above. He watched the stars appear, dots of light in the indigo night sky. It was cold, bitter, biting, cruel, and numbing. The half-melted snow lied; Spring had yet to come. Winter’s icy grasp still had an iron core. The twinkling stars above seemed so cold in their brightness, and the moon so dismal and small, that is was little wonder that both light and heat was scarce. As he trudged through the snowy streets, devoid of life or warmth, the mere half liter of vodka continued to slosh, the dinner jackets continued to be sack cloth, and the riches he so fondly dreamed of continued to stay cloaked in dreary, bleak poverty. As he stared at the vacant stores’ displays, half-empty and half-rotting, vestiges of a better time, of happiness and money, he took another smoky breath, and another gulp of the fiery water known as vodka, the distilled potatoes that served as a feeble alternative in the absence of a warm embrace, or the smile of a friend. It was a small comfort, a layer of callous numbness to suppress the gnawing hunger and the turmoil of emotions. He continued down the derelict avenues and alley ways, he dwelt on half-forgotten things, memories and dreams, best left suppressed. The dreams, they hinted at better days, and teased him with previously forgotten memories, happy daydreams of the past, and then brutally tore them from his mind, leaving him painfully empty. The memories were of fire and rivers of blood, screams and pain, loved ones ripped from his arms as he stared on, unable to act as he watched their faces contort with an agony unspeakable. The skyscrapers stood as lonely sentinels of the night, no longer adorned with flashing and twinkling lights, their pride and beauty removed, as absent as their previous caretakers. Beneath their shadows, he laid down to sleep, a broken man finding refugee beneath a broken roof. Night gave way to day, and he awoke to the tingling of the sun’s heat on numb, frozen skin. It wasn’t a comfort to a dying man; it merely was a cruel promise of one more day of pain and heat, one more serene sunset of lukewarm emotion, and one more night of death and cold. It wasn’t the nights that hurt the worst; it was the sunsets, the remembering of terrible things, and the prelude to darkness. * * *This was literally flash fiction; I churned it out in less than half an hour. Don't be any less critizing because of that, though. A writer needs all the critiquing they can acquire.
