I pulled a
random book off my shelf: I Sing the
Body Electric by Ray Bradbury (A book I actually have not read all the way through).
I used a random
number generator to choose the sentence starting on the eleventh line on the two
hundred and seventy-fifth page.
I wrote for ten minutes. This is the story I got.
“You make it sound like a plague drove
them-.”
Elizabeth lost
her train of thought as we passed a week-old corpse lying in the gutter. Rags that were once an expensive
business suite hung from the shriveled body.
I had tried to
remove all human remains around the grocery store where I had found the young
woman. The task had wasted over a
day, and I had become careless toward the end.
Taking her hand,
I guided her away from the body. She was dressed in cut-off jeans and a pink
tank top. I wore a Hazmat
suit.
“There was a plague,” I told her. “Millions were dead before the cities
could be evacuated.”
“Is anyone still
alive?”
“Of course, but they
are hundreds of miles from here.”
“What about me? Do you have another one of those suits?”
I snorted. “You’re the last person in the world
who needs one.”
“What’s that
supposed to mean?”
“You’ll see. Do you remember anything at all?”
“Not
really. I was in the grocery store
with my mom when I bumped into this man and suddenly people were screaming and
he was puking up red. Things got
fuzzy and I saw… It must have been a dream. When I woke up I was still in the store and you were there….”
We rounded a
corner, and before us stood the first living thing we had encountered since
leaving the store.
The white horse approached
us from the other side of the street.
It had a starved, skeletal body and kept its muzzle low to the ground.
“Oh, baby…” Elizabeth moaned. “She looks so sick.”
“She’s
fine. She’s in her natural
environment.”
The horse
whinnied and nuzzled Elizabeth. The
woman kissed the animal’s nose. “Hey
there beautiful.”
“I’m glad you
like her. She belongs to you.”
No comments:
Post a Comment