where fires burn | fiction

new story idea

***I’m working on a new story idea and would appreciate any feedback—please feel free to leave a comment or share with those you think would enjoy dystopian fiction. The style is new to me but one I feel has some story in it.***

Once upon a time, somewhere in the nowhere lands, beggar cries reminded the man of seagulls he would count as a child when fishing in the once blue ocean.

Bone thin bodies stood scratching at scars the shape of kidney, waved clumps of hair beside a broken road as though white flags looking to surrender to the earth. The man stepped off a rusty shell of a bus and made his way through a small gathering of the starving and diseased. Several were naked, others dressed in rags found blowing across the land on occasional wind-swept days. Each human who could cry out did so as the man passed. Their voices sounded like an agony reserved for the mourning or in pain. Smoke in the distance rose and turned a skyline the colour soot. The man looked up, imagined a once abundant flock of birds flying free as he moved carrying a backpack over both shoulders. Dome shaped huts made from clay, a crater where a lake once was and bones of the dead dotted a barren land. The absence of fertile life served as a reminder that no matter who you were in this world: a will to live was required to go on.

The man moved towards the only dilapidated building he could see. Beyond the road, away from dying beggars. Ash from the fires blanketed a clay like surface, forcing everyone to exist in grey. The building leaned like a tower in a country called Italy the man had seen in a picture book as a boy. Books used to fuel one of the great capital city fires. The building the man approached was missing brick. Chunks of a once dome shaped roof were now fragments his boots stepped over. The roof reminded the man of a half-eaten apple that had been snatched from his mouth as a child in the final days of fruit growth. Arriving at the building, he pressed a buzzer and waited for a thick wooden door covered in scratch marks to open.

At first no one came to the door. As he stood the man noticed a woman and child a few feet away. Tearing a piece of bread from the remains of a loaf he kept in a bum bag around his waist, he winced, knelt to offer food to a young mother who lay in the foetal position. In her arms she cradled a child covered in ash. The man couldn’t tell if the motionless child was dead or asleep. The woman’s eyes were black and vacant, stared ahead towards rising smoke. He placed the piece of bread by her side, watched as she placed it in her mouth and began chewing.

‘Where is tomorrow?’ the man said. Running a hand through curly hair, he stood up and stared at the word please scratched into the deadwood door. ‘Where the fuck is tomorrow?’

It took more banging and several minutes of waiting until the front door creaked open. Once inside the building owner approached him. A set of keys dangled from a chain attached to his hip. The building owner was snake thin and had slanting eyes and a jaundice complexion. But his thick black hair impressed the man. Once he had paid the man was told to follow. Inside a room he turned a key to lock a door, threw a backpack onto worn carpet and lay down on a mattress until the sickness came. Then the sickness came.