The Invitation

FC August Prompts

Photo by Olga Thelavart on Unsplash

“Got a job for you,” the note said. “I think you’ll like it better than delivering newspapers.”

The note had been tucked under my tent flap, written on a piece of yesterday’s newspaper. An address was scrawled on it.

I had no idea at first who left it, or why.

No one knew how the Bang happened. One day things were completely normal, and then the next it was not.

I remember seeing it outside my window. A burst of bright light, brighter than the sun. Only for a few seconds. Then the light turned to a tiny point in the sky, and everything I’d ever known was wiped out. We barely made it outside as the shock wave broke the house apart.

Without digital communication, we were never able to find out what happened. The survivors did not get radiation sickness. Perhaps some new kind of weapon, we surmised. News did trickle through, bit by bit. Mostly rumors.

Within a year the first printing presses were cobbled together, rescued from museums across the country and put back into action. I was 15 years old and had my first job, delivering newspapers.

We built shacks to live in, using Amazon boxes as shingles.

The weirdest thing about the Bang was the portals.

Random rifts in space and time, ripped open by whatever the Bang was. You couldn’t see them. People would randomly walk into one and disappear. I was afraid to walk anywhere. I used a stick to poke at the air, the ground.

Eventually the locations of most of the holes were found and marked. Shrubbery planted, crude signs posted, or cinder blocks set around them.

I got to know a lot of my surviving neighbors through that job. There was no way to set up subscriptions, so I would spend the day riding my bike through the shanty town, selling them piece by piece, for whatever I could get for them.

There was this old man on my route. He was a veteran from the Iran war. I brought him supplies when I could, as it was difficult for him to get around. The world had become so harsh; I wanted to spread kindness however I could, despite the hellscape. We would chat. He would make tea. I told him about my dreams despite my world being obliterated. He seemed impressed at my optimism.

As I sipped my morning tea, I decided it was that old soldier who’d left the note.

What else could I do? Might as well check it out.

That’s how I made it into Crabapple Bay.

It’s the dog days of August, and I’m fresh out of ideas. To the rescue:

[embed]📝 Writer Rescue Tabs 📝 Slump Remedies for Augustmedium.com

I tore off: Who left the note?

Here’s a spooky response to the same question:

[embed]Who Left The Note? FC August Prompts — Who left the note?medium.com