This is my entry for the flash-fiction contest being hosted by Angela Goff, Angie Richmond, Daniel Swensen, and Lillie McFerrin. The prompt was to write 300 words or less using this photograph as inspiration:

I interpreted “inspiration” rather loosely-I hope not too loosely! At any rate, this is my entry:

Life

They called him El Viejo, the Old One, because no one knew his real name anymore, and because he was old enough to remember the world before the Burning.

He talked about it, if anyone cared to listen. He was very old now and he got confused sometimes and Cat knew he just jumbled the stories together every which way, repeating himself, contradicting himself, mixing parts up. But it didn’t matter. She listened anyway.

She tried to picture it while he talked, all of it floating jumbled and disjointed before her mind’s eye: huge cities spinning with sights and smells, sounds and colors; streets flooded with people; sparkling ships on blue oceans; shining planes in the sky (here she tried to picture the rust-eaten hulls out in the junk yard made bright and new again). Clean white electric light against the night-chill and blackness. Food in people’s bellies, water on their tongues. Water turning the dust to black mud underfoot, and new life bursting from it.

That was always where his words took her, in the end. Not to the cities or the oceans or the skies, but to a quieter place, a smaller place-a wet green place beneath trees, a cool silver mist clinging to her skin, a breeze to lift the hair from her sweaty neck, grass and flowers pushing up between her bare toes. There’d be music. Not the brassy blaring music that Paco played from his machine sometimes. Softer music: the song of wind in the trees, the song of brook-water.

That was life, El Viejo said, talking about the old cities. And she always wanted to shake her head, and correct him, and tell him about the green place and the trees. But she didn’t, because it didn’t matter after all.

Word count: 297