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bellale

[critique][short story] Post Apocalyptic Story of a Woman.

Theres not really a whole lot to say about me. I'm writing this short story and I would really appreciate critique on the intro. This is the story of a woman Alone on earth after the apocalypse. I'm a student.

It's warm. It always is.  Even though I'm used to it, every day it surprises me. After the apocalypse there's no more air conditioning, or electricity. That's not the part that gets to me though. It's the silence. No more talking, no more listening. The world fell into a perpetual silence on the day. That day, the one that continues playing over in my head. The running and screaming but mostly the crying. The mothers sitting in the street clutching their babies that they know they cannot save, crying. The husbands telling their wives that it would be alright. Sometimes they were clutching each other, clinging as if their spouse could save them and sometimes they were just touching, stroking each others hair or holding hands, but they were always crying. Now those noises are gone, replaced with only memories. 
I lifted my head from my pillow and opened my eyes. It was already day time, I overslept. Though I suppose that doesn't matter, I have no job or school or obligations. The world is my oyster, my empty, lifeless, dried up oyster.  I sat up in bed running the sleep out of my eyes and looked around my room. Everything is still here, no robberies occurred during the night. 
"Ha... ha..." I laughed out loud. Yes, one of the other nonexistent humans on the earth had robbed me.  Everything was as I left it. Charred and burned to a crisp but exactly the same.
As hard to accept as it is, this is my life now. At age thirty six, after years of climbing the corporate ladder to become one of the most powerful women in the computer business, and after years of hard work to start and raise a family with my loving husband, Jeff, this is all I have. A house with no roof and only half of the walls left in tact, and a dead family. Images began to flood into my head of burying my sweet little daughter, only five years old, next to her father. This is a level of grief that no one should ever have to go through. I will though, I will push through this and I will survive.  There are always the times usually in the dead of night where the voices will come. Those little voices in the back of your head that tell you, "You are not good enough." "You are not smart enough" or even "Wouldn't you rather be with your family? You can, it's easy! All you have to do is take the gun out of your night stand, put it in your mouth and just like that, bang! Your with them! You get to see them smile again and laugh again. You can even hold your baby girl. How does that sound? Just get the gun." Every time I rebelled against the voices. They would not take life from me, It's mine.    
I walked out of my bedroom, shedding the images of my family in their graves, into what was left of my kitchen. I moved my hand across the lumpy surface that was my kitchen counter as chills ran up my spine. It had melted due to the heat and while most of it just formed into a blob of a counter top some of it dripped onto the floor.  I scraped up the runoff with my toe until all the evidence of the drips were the off color sections left on the hard wood floors. 

Posted Jul 10, 2012, 8:06 AM UTC

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