Day 2 Writing Short Stories

Wave

The city had been bombed to the ground. The once vibrant streets were now a death trap. I kept my gun ready as I advanced at the back of my battalion. I dared to glance at the fallen buildings, picturing them in their former glory and what it was like to live here. It was a life no one would get to enjoy for years to come. That was gone. My life, as it had been before the war, was gone, and it would never return. There was no city to go back to, no country that the war with the aliens hadn’t affected.

They had come, and without the nuclear bombs, Earth would have been taken in a matter of days. The bombs had been better, even when there were places no one could go now. Places that would never heal. Not in my lifetime, at least.

I squeezed my gun and surveyed the fallen buildings. I waited for those monstrous grab-like creatures to emerge at any time. They wouldn’t. The bombs had killed them all. There was only the cleanup left. This was the last hold the aliens had. In the heart of the city, there would be the last mothership to clean, harvest, and destroy. That was where we were heading. I could feel the excitement and the terror. This would be our first ship. The last ship. Our names would be remembered in the history books. I looked around, dazed at my comrades. But there was no excitement. There was just the fear, the fear of the rumors that this was just the first wave of many.

But next time we would be ready. I knew how to kill the motherfuckers that had killed everyone I knew. I knew how to rip their shells open with bombs and how to aim at their joints. We all did. Heroes or killers depended on the view. People still thought there was a peaceful way to coexist. But they hadn’t seen combat. They hadn’t seen how those things can tear a man apart or how they use their fallen kind against us.

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Today’s draw was: contemporary writing style, war as a genre, overcoming the monster as a narrative, and first-person point of view.

Okay, war is not a genre, but I expanded my list a little bit. Today’s prompt was hard. I was at a loss finding a motive and with the writing style, but luckily, there was the monster word that gave me a way out. I could have taken it as symbolic and written about the monstrousness of war or human nature or what we are capable of doing to each other, but if I have an opportunity to write about aliens, I’m going to write about aliens. Aliens are aliens, and they make everything better. I even have a UFO tattooed on my arm. It’s a tiny one shooting into the sky out of the treeline. The little saucer always makes me smile. Good damn it, you should never speak about tattoos. It’s like a curse that wants to multiply. The biggest one I ever took took eight hours to make. I did it in one sitting. At the end of the last hour, I was ready to give up. The pain became annoying. Sigh, no more tattoos. Three is enough.

I don’t know if I got the writing style right. I was too much in the soldier’s headspace, not enough out of it, and not enough in the story and the setting. I think there is something I need to practice more.

I have a team-building day at work today. We go and make pottery. I’m excited. Finally, something interesting to do, and not the usual annoying things we do.

Thank you for reading! Have a spacious day ❤