August
I started this blog a year and a day ago.
In honour of this – and in anticipation of a deeper writing-related post on the horizon, I’ve dug up an old short story for you – the first I’ve posted here. Enjoy.
AUGUST
One hot day in August, the sky burned.
The first sign that something was amiss came when the brushed fleece of the cirrus melted. Their wispy edges browned and shrivelled up, curling in on themselves like cellophane held too close to the glowing cherry of a cigarette.
Nobody noticed the demise of the aeroplankton, nor of the wind-borne mites and spiders as they flamed out of existence like doomed micrometeorites. Indeed, those who might have noticed had problems of their own, those holidaymakers and businessmen who began to roast as their gleaming aircraft stalled and began to plummet, trailing liquid metal droplets in their wake.
Bar-headed geese, Whooper swans and other high-flying waterfowl returned to earth like comets in comae of their own vaporised down, their charred pennaceous feathers disintegrating in the rain of lower-flying songbirds that came next.
Soon the sun began to drip golden beads of fire into the ocean, where they lay shimmering on the surface to form a blinding line where temperate sea met smouldering sky. The immense vista of the heavens themselves began to slough, sagging with heat-stroke, and the deeper blues of the zenith encroached into the paler cyans over the horizon, tainting them with oily streaks.
The clouds were but a distant memory, the sun a burning slick that stifled the frustrated waves. Suborbitals, X-planes and weather balloons had all but evaporated on their Hadean journeys back to earth. Boeing and Airbus competed to see whose slagged products were least toxic to salvage, and the former grace and beauty of the birds lay in broken chunks of charcoal on the increasingly viscous asphalt.
The first azure globes fell, warped by air resistance, striking the roofs of office blocks, banks and churches and exploding into millions of droplets of cerulean solution to paint the streets. Then sluiced down trickles, then streams, which swelled into rivers and finally great cataracts that drained the heavens and inundated the land.
Soon the hot August sky covered the ground, and all was blue. The naked moon gazed down from the inky depths of space and wondered what the hell was going on.
I think the moon would be a bit cold if it was naked in space. Though being big might help keep it warm. That’s a pretty good story actually and shows a great knowledge of descriptive writing. Not a great deal happened, but you wrote like the world was ending.
Wow! This was great. Your use of language is amazing, I loved the poetry of it.
Wow, that was quite impressive!
Beautiful use of words, that conjures up a myriad of vivid imagery…Oh no, I sound like one of those pretensions twats on the ‘Late Show’. I should have started off with the obligatory, “this works on many levels…” 🙂
That was amazing! I can’t believe how detailed it was. I hope you decide to share more of your stories with us.
Happy One Year Blog-o-versary Ash! I am very happy you started to blog a year ago, and hope you continue for years to come. Cheers!
And as far as your story-well done. I have to agree with Rachel, I hope you decide share more of your writing with us here in the future.
Very well written. Although I could not resist mentally adding a few good KABOOMS and SHAPOWS becasue I figured that the sky melting off would probably sound kinda like that. SHAPLOOOSHKKK.
Congratulations on one year!
And that piece was really deep.
Goddammit, this isn’t the forum for you. More people should be reading your stuff. Way more people.
But it was awesome to see how diverse your writing skills are.
Happy one year (ish)!
Also, I was not expecting this (the style of short story). Very well written, very vivid imagery, and so beautifully chaotic. What Youngman said. More people should see this.