I wrote this for Creative Writing last semester
It's not entirely finished yet, but this is what I submitted
I wanted to create a character who initially seemed like a nice decent person, but actually turns out to be a complete bastard, even though he himself doesn't realise it
At the end of the world, I was standing with my son watching the stars go out, an omen of the entity that came to destroy our home. The destroyer ripped through the cosmos, snuffing out the gaseous giants of the sky and devouring all of the energy in its wake, sucking everything up into the core of its ‘heart’. It was gathering strength. A being of such power, strong as it may be, could not obliterate an entire planet with its own brute force. Stars were easy. Since there was no life in a star, taking away something which didn’t have any souls was child’s play. A planet housing several trillion souls was different. It required something borrowed, astronomical. At least, that’s how we understood it.
My son skipped in circles around our old dog, Rams, trying to rouse him from his lifelong drowsiness. Ever since we’d owned him, he’d either been asleep, or eating. They were blissfully unaware of the inbound horrors. The thing was that no-one knew where it came from and, at this particular juncture, I don’t think it was a thought that occupied many people’s minds. A car shot past, red Holden easily doing 150 in a 60 zone. It didn’t really matter though. No matter how fast he had driven the place he was destined to go would probably have been destroyed before he made it anyway. My mind began to wander to better things. Movies would be gone… TV would be gone… laughing, comics, sausages, kittens. Chocolate… my son… I’d never see Rocky Balboa…
I shook my head from side to side, dragging myself out of the lament for an Italian boxer. My son had stopped playing with Rams and stood staring at the sky, mouth open, eyes wide. He cocked his head and looked at me
“Where is mummy?” he asked. I hadn’t expected him to say that. No “Dad what’s that giant ball of death coming toward us?” or “Are we going to die?”. A lump had crawled into my throat, I swallowed but it stayed where it was. I didn’t want to die feeling like that. Feeling that loss, stupid child. Ignorant, stupid child. I’d told him hundreds of times why she wasn’t there any more. He never listened. I cursed my son, cursed him for making my last moments ones in which I was angry…
-Memory Stream interrupted-
“The last thing I ever thought about him while he was alive… I cursed him, Ivan, I cursed my son with every fibre of my being for saying that to me. I wish I had loved him more then”
-Connection re-established-
-broadcasting from last break-
-Memory stream recording-
Heneverlistened.Icursedmyson,cursedhimformakingmylastmomentsonesinwhichIwasangry…
I later used a universal narrator, an ingenious Tradian invention which allows one to view certain crucial events in history, I had asked the machine to give me a meaningful rendition of my home’s destruction. I played the sequence back, and from what I remember it went like this: ‘Then all the wind stopped, the planet ceased to rotate and simply waited. What was once a meadow full of life became a dark field of silence. Every living being on the face of the planet stood completely still, their heads hanging back, staring at the forbidding sky. A Sherpa atop the great
It didn’t rumble, at least not at first, instead it felt as if all the hatred was boiling up inside me. It was like all the anger and pain that I had accumulated over my entire life was focusing into my soul, pushing it to the surface. I gritted my teeth hard and clenched my fists, my nails cutting into my flesh and drawing blood. Even later I never understood why. I speculated as to why, but overshadowed by the rage I was unable to think straight. I tried to calm myself as I tore my eyes from the sky to see Rams up on his legs, baring his teeth and snarling viciously at my son, who was shouting back at him, fuelled by an unnatural rage. I tried to scream out, but first there came a sound, very distant. It grew into a cacophony so immense it could be heard far away in space. There were only screams, no time… no time…
It hit somewhere around
The cold of space gripped my lungs, I breathed… but what? I flailed my arms wildly at the realisation that at that very moment my eyes may have been popping out of my head. They weren’t. I kicked and punched but hit nothing, I screamed until my throat was bleeding but no-one heard. Then a few things of consequence happened very quickly: in my confusion I hadn’t paid much attention to anything around me. After I’d calmed down I turned my head, finally focusing on the situation that I was in. There wasn’t much left and what was there didn’t really leave the impression that a planet was occupying the space not 2 minutes ago. A few shards of earth and metal floating about off in the distance bumped into each other, then bounced off in opposite directions. Being in space, it became hard to judge how far away something was. Without anything to compare it to, I could only have assumed that unless I could touch something then it could have been anywhere. Then all at once, an explosion rushed past my left eye. Some volatile remnant of earth, a huge chunk flew past my right and a burning mass shot straight for me. The Destroyer. It came to an abrupt halt right in front of my nose, floating ominously there, all knowing and powerful. It somehow seemed contented, curious, as if it had never seen a human before, though it had destroyed my home and everything I loved, I felt as if it, whatever it was, was just a baby. It was looking for something and that something it had not found by destroying this planet. It stared at me for a while longer then it seemed to look up, as if it had heard something far off in the distance. Just before it took off it looked back at me, but instead of the flaming mass, it was my face, depicted in the fire itself.
“Why can’t I eat you?” it asked
“What?” I asked back
“I couldn’t eat your brother either…” It trailed off, more occupied with the thing it had heard. It disappeared in a flash.
I remember thinking to myself: “What does my brother have to do with this?” I hadn’t seen him in over 5 years and he wasn’t even part of the research project into The Destroyer, so what possible connection could he have had to it at all? I shook my face, as I so often did back then, and tried to figure out what I was going to do with myself. I was all alone, since my entire race had just been brutally killed by a giant cosmic death ball thingy, I was in space, alive, which by all accounts was theoretically impossible. An image of Albert I, the poor Rhesus monkey flickered into my mind as I imagined the horrors of space travel. I tried to move, but I couldn’t build up any momentum, I cried out for help. I simply spun there, hanging in the infinite depth of the beyond. Unable to move, unable to escape and unable to die.
A few hours after the destruction, my ears prickled and my head shot up, I had heard something, out in that horrible consuming blackness. It was a very faint noise, but it was undoubtedly there. A small human voice in the distance. And at that moment, I knew that I wasn’t the only one, others had survived, and now they were stuck, like me, floating in eternal space.
-Memory recording over-
-Ending Connection-
-Subject vitals normal-
-Reanimating-
I woke up, as if I’d been in a deep sleep, having a most horrible dream about death and pain. I was in a hot confined space, strapped into a large green chair.
