UPDATED WITH WINNER: LitReactor's Flash Fiction Smackdown: June Edition

No Reason
The fire bloweth where the fire listeth, climbing up hill faster than I could follow with mine eye. When I lit the lucifer and flung it towards the resinous spruce duff my sphincter contracted, and that feeling of…I can’t describe the feeling. It’s mine, the feeling, and I don’t understand feelings anyway. Here one picosecond, gone the next. Like the trees combusting and carbonising before me. Why? Why not? The trees were destined for logging and then the paper mill for the world to blow their nose and wipe their arse on anyways. I’m no eco warrior. There is neither political, social or ecological, rhyme nor reason to this. No statement is being made. I just did it. The feeling is a side effect. I don’t enjoy or dislike it. But I watch them burn. And, in a detached way, I’m glad they won’t be there tomorrow. Only charred poles. Like post apocalyptic light posts.

Viking Funeral

I didn’t get why we just couldn’t have taken Jason to the hospital?

All we needed to do was dump it in front of the emergency room, done and done. And it’s not like we’d killed him—was it our fault Jason got dumped off his bike and somehow managed to run over his own head?

But when Robbie and Steve came whipping around the corner and saw Jase under the motorcycle, a puddle of blood spreading over the desert floor, they flipped. No so much about Jase bleeding out from his shredded skull, but because of the $500 worth of gak they’d been shoveling up their noses all weekend. No way were we taking him to a hospital—NO! FUCKING! WAY!

Instead, they bundled up the body, hauled it back to camp, and sat up all night thinking about what to do?

WHAT TO DO!

WHAT TO DO!

When I woke up the next morning, what they decided on was to haul the body out into the middle of the desert, (the middle of the desert being 5 miles away from our camp) douse him in lighter fluid, and give him a Viking funeral.

It took Robbie six matches to finally get the body smoldering; another three for it to actually catch fire. Of course, by then all the summer dry juniper surrounding us was crackling golden and chimney red, a high wind carrying ash from one bush to the next and to the next.

12-21-2012

“It’s the end of days,” she says, leaning against the old cracked rake. 
“We knew it was a-comin’,” he answers, downing the end of his lemonade and wiping sweat from his brow.
The man and woman stand outside a slanted shack, the old door hanging off its hinges, the lawn overrun by weeds and June bugs. 
The woman drops her rake to the ground and walks towards the porch.  “I’m gonna get the bible.”
“Little late for that,” the man mutters. 
He doesn’t know if the tears running down his cheeks are from the thick black smoke or the fear that this is truly the end.  “God damned burning bush,” he mumbles.  He slips calloused hands into dirty overall pockets and leans back on his heels.
God, he can smell the fire.  It reminds him of Boy Scout summers and sticky marshmallow fingers.  But this, of course, is nothing like that.  “If a tree falls in the woods…” he thinks. 

“Fucker, put that down,” yells the boy in the backwards baseball cap.  He throws a cigarette to the ground and slips behind tall oaks. 
His friend laughs, calls him a pussy, and runs after him waving a burning tree branch. 

Hours later the woods are raging.  Days later two are missing. 

“It’s moving so fast,” says the woman, clutching her worn bible.
“Time to go” says the man.
She nods slightly as he takes her hand and they walk into the trees.

A Retouched Canvas

She wiped the crimson lipstick from her mouth, its puckered drawing upon the napkin a small picture upon amateur canvas. The lipstick leaving her lips, she felt like a painting having been retouched and redefined into what wasn’t exactly presentable. Outside her window, Degeneres Molloy heard a rustling from beneath the leaves which the sunlight poured down upon from between the filter of branches that hung from her weeping willow tree. She wondered who was rustling around in front of her house making the despicable noises that crept within the alcoves of her ears and screamed profanity through a hidden filter of phonetic rape. She peered through the blinds, her blue eyes screaming icy wonders as they placed themselves between the white strips of brightness. Degeneres could not understand who was making the noise that knocked upon her delicate skull. She exited her front door with a firm grip on the railing beside its wooden frame, a metal spatula in her grasp that whispered impolite nothings to the presumed visitor.
“I will find you!” She screamed as she tumbled down the steps, her face resting aggressively against the worn concrete below. Degeneres turned her head slightly to find a child with a box of uneaten cookies standing before her. With blood dripping from her lips, Degeneres reached out her hand and grasped the small oval treat, pressing it between her teeth, the chocolate and blood pouring fluidly upon her faithful spatula, the blood upon her lips resembling a finished canvas.

A Moment Before Dying

Flame-soaked hills burst with brimstone, a 3 A.M. sunset horizon. I stretched out my hand, catching gray ash as it rained upon me, nuclear precipitation. The first bomb had arrived.

I would miss my son the most, his gleaming cobalt eyes cool in contrast to the smoldering distant landscape. The light upon his face reflected hope. Now, with the orange glow of Hell calling out to Heaven, hope was extinguished. I thanked God he was with my ex-wife on the other side of the country, if it bought them only an extra minute, I was thankful he would live that minute.

I would miss my job, the economic market value it had given me, but mostly just the promise of another day of ordinary life. Work was an unshakeable perpetual motion machine. Now, my office lay smothered by burnt offerings of war.  I would miss monotony, the morning coffee, the afternoon drive, the reading lamp on the nightstand before bed.

A manuscript still waited in my desk at home, the novel I never finished. The dream of being a writer escaped me, lost within a thousand procrastinating excuses. I would die as many things, but a writer wasn’t one of them.

Surrounding screams serenaded death, heralding its arrival. The next bomb would come, bringing our demise with it. No amount of running could save us.

I looked to Heaven, staring hard through radioactive smog, a moment before dying, praying for the sort of hope that could only come from cobalt eyes.

Traveling with Death

“Are you ready?”
“Not yet.” The old man said.
“I really think we should be going.”
“I’m not finished.”
“What else is there?”
“Just one more.”
“We can see it on the way.”
“That’s a lie.  You know that’s a lie.” The old man’s stare dropped to the ground.
“I know.  We really should be going.”
“One last thing.”
“Okay.”
They looked out on the place where the man lived as a boy.  A small house sat on a hill, next to the ridge.  Past the tree line, the mountains climbed along the sky.  The sun hit them and revealed empty sections where wildfires had burned away the forest. Trees covered the peaks like skin, the barren places were scars.
“We really should be going.”
“Please.”
“Okay.”
“When I was a boy, I killed my father in that house.”  The old man felt the swell of tears.  “The liquor took hold of him and he came after me.  I stabbed him with his own knife.”
“I know.”
“I never came back here after that night.  I was afraid of it, what it would do to me.  I was right to be frightened.”  The old man said as he turned away from his home.  He looked into the sky and took a breath.  His eyes closed and he felt the cool air as it entered his lungs.
“Are you ready?”
“I think so.”  The old man opened his eyes and the sky began to melt away.
“Okay.”

THE COLLECTOR

The land was his by the way of a will. It was all that he had; the land, the trees, and the artifacts that had been collected by himself and descendants and thought of as a kind of pension. A menagerie of obsessions that decorated the acreage and cluttered the halls of the home where he was raised and now just fodder of ever lessening value.

He locked the doors of the car, coughed till his lungs restricted, choked and rolled the windows tight. He’d been offered great sums of money from the advancing population. Time and again they came with their check books, blue prints and plans for development.  He turned them away.

He felt the heat and heard the cracking of fallen timber in the smoke and flames outside. He’d been ordered to evacuate. He’d been given orders over the years on other things too and ignored them as well. It was his land and he’d do as he pleased.

He heard the sound of the tires on the car exploding, one by one and smelled the stench of burning rubber and wires. He had no wife or children to speak of, or would speak of him and he kept to himself, his junk and integrity.

He removed his fingers from the steering wheel and with it came strings of plastic and flesh. They said the fire was coming his way and he thought if it did, it would be his to own as well.
 

A Toast to Bridges Burned

The punch of smoke hit his palate first, followed by a briny earthiness as if the sea had burned and left only this essence in his glass. It eased the pain of the day and gave clarity to the moment. The glass pulled at his lip before he thoughtfully set his drink back on the bar. Raul stirred on the worn barstool and thought back on the bridges he burned today.

Management had been coercive about the signature, but Raul wouldn’t do it. Anger had gotten the better of him and hot words spat across the room, leaving burn marks on the remaining goodwill. Cleaning out his desk by flipping over furniture only served to cutoff any chance of returning. He really didn’t care—the corporate world scarred him months ago. Better to return to work he knew that gave him dirty fingernails and a father’s guidance. Back to a father that taught Raul what he loved, how to create, and when to follow God’s lanterns.

Sitting at the bar, he celebrated today’s course correction with a double pour, neat—no garnish, no regrets. And a toast that’s been passed from huddled, laughing men of the family to curious, young ears of brothers and cousins always hovering nearby. Para todo mal, mezcal.

Skin-deep

Megan N.

Cost of my weave: $552.37. Temperature that melts human hair? 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Chance of me going after her? Zero. I mean, she might not even be in there. She’s probably not.

Either way, I’m not taking the chance of ruining my mascara.

My knees ache from squatting on this hill for so long. I toss my hair behind silver hoop earrings and watch waves of orange, getting hotter. It’s okay; she’s not there.  My stilettos stick in the dirt like her fingers stuck to my skin. Like her fingers stick to each other.

Temperature skin melts? 158 degrees Fahrenheit.

See, I wouldn’t have any reason for wanting her gone. None, officers. She was my friend. We wear miniskirts together and sometimes we go out. Sometimes I can feel her, burning hot under my hand, long after hours. We got our hair done, together, officers.

Temperature gasoline burns? 475 degrees.

Officer, her hair was tacky, but whatever. She was a little slutty, but no big deal.

This was more thinking than I’d had to do in a long time. More even than she made me do. Even if she was in there, it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t make her go in. I never told her to step back once the gas was lit. I never said to make sure she didn’t let the gasoline too cold…once it hit -49 degrees, it’d never burn again.

I just invested in waterproof makeup.

Temperature my heart will melt? Hotter than her fire.

Photo Box

The air is dense with falling embers and everybody breathes in sparks, breathes out ashes. All down the street families load pet carriers into cars. A kid stands barefoot on his lawn with his hands cupped over his mouth. He calls out a dog’s name. A television in the kitchen says which neighborhoods need to vacate. Where to go. It gives a checklist of things to take. Bring blankets, the weatherman says. Bring water.

Star scatters through the house. She takes vinyl records and books. Picture frames. She bounces off my shoulder on her way out. Would you grab something? She asks.

Grab what?

I don’t know. Something.

And then she’s out. She piles our things into the hatchback. Room enough without pets. Or a kid.

I go to our closet and open it. Star’s collection of shoes. A rainbow of clothes and one black dress. A black suit I bought special and only wore the one time. I consider taking them, but don’t. Star comes back inside. She picks commemorative plates off the wall.

There is a box in the corner that’s covered with dust and fingerprints. My fingerprints. Star’s dust. I set the box on the bed and open it. Pictures of a girl up until she was nineteen, then nothing. I close the lid and tuck the box under my arm. Go to the hall.

Do we have to bring her? Star asks.

Yes I do, I say.

Home

“Mommy, why does the forest have to die?”

The little rabbit held his mother’s paw as they watched their home burn from the safety of the valley below. They had been the only two to make it out of their hole in time. The little rabbit was heartbroken while his mother remained calm.

“Everything has to die,” she said, “Birds, foxes, rabbits, even forests. Otherwise there won’t be room for any more of us.”

“But why did the fire come now, Mommy?”

“For many, many rabbit lives,” she began, “the forest floor has been holding trees up to touch the sky, while we dug it up to make homes for our families. Everything from those wide-trunked older trees to those tiny blades of clover you find so delicious, from the aphids crawling on the clover flowers to the great brown bears shimmying up tree trunks to take honey from the bees, all take life from the forest floor. The ground was getting tired. But it still gave its last to keep all of us alive. So the sun stepped in and covered the land with its rays, to keep the forest floor warm while it goes to sleep.”

“But what about the trees? And what about our friends?”

“All of the life from the woods will grow into a new forest. It’s time for us to go, little one.”

The little rabbit took one last look, twitched his nose, and then followed his mother down the path.

Friends

When I was a child I had a doll. Her name was Annabelle Lee and she had golden, corn coloured hair and eyes the colour of sunny skies, she was my friend. My best friend. Annabelle Lee went everywhere with me and I loved her more than life. I'd lie in bed at night and wish she was real and that she could tell me what she saw with those glassy blue eyes. On my sixth birthday as I blew out my candles I wished extra hard and it came true. That night when I went to bed I leant over to kiss Annabelle Lee and wish her goodnight and she spoke.

From then on Annabelle Lee and I couldn't be parted. She told me about the best places to pick flowers and about the best trees to climb. She told me what to say to make little John Smith at school cry for pulling my hair. She told me secrets about his mother and what she did with men in her bedroom when he was asleep and his father was away. How they would hush their moans so not to wake him. His eyes would never again meet mine.

When I was 13, people had begun to laugh about the fact I took Annabelle Lee everywhere but neither of us cared, we were happy. Less happy were my parents who told me that I was silly, a child, that people were talking about me and saying unkind things. They tried to take Annabelle Lee away from me so I ran. I ran out to the shed and sat there in the dark crying and heaving. Thats when Annabelle Lee told me what to do, she told me where they kept the gas can and where I could find matches. I didn't want to but she said it was the only way we'd be together. I couldn't bare to watch but Annabelle Lee watched everything, silently with the flames flickering in her cold blue eyes. They came and they took her from me and it was so sad but I understand now that it was for the best.

So now I need a new friend. Maybe it can be YOU. We could be best friends.

Knowing

Was it the acrid smell of burning or the loud symphony of crackling that first aroused him from his slumber?  Not that he really had time to ponder these things.  As Eric bolted upright he found he was sitting in a clearing in the woods.  Even bigger than the question of how he got there when he remembered going to sleep at home, was the reality that everything as far as the eye could see was ablaze.  There were many questions that needed answering if he could manage his way out of this one, including the others whom his gaze finally settled upon.  All of them appearing just as disoriented as he felt.  He wasn’t sure rather he should feel relieved to not be alone or if it would be more sensible to guard himself from these strangers.  Do things the way he was accustomed - alone!  Except there was one face that his eyes kept involuntarily roaming back to.  It was such a strange sensation, feeling like he knew this man like the back of his hand and yet couldn’t give you a name to save his life. 

Ah yes, back to the matter of saving his life.  He had no way of telling where he was at, never mind how to escape the wall of fire that surrounded him.  He almost wanted to laugh when he reached into his pocket and found it empty, feeling slightly foolish for expecting it to be there in the first place.          

TwoSeebee

How high, he asked. Don't ask, he said. 

Every time it was the same story: a cut, a switch, a laugh and an itch. TwoSeebee killed it every time. Thread-weaver. Resurrectioneer. Spider-censure. Gulfen flames. The past tense. 

The tent he bought was fire-proof, they told him. Too bad. He might've caught on sooner.

Nothing is fire-proof.

Slips

Reaching into the fridge, Marcus noticed the permission slip tacked to the front. Clearly his wife had forgotten to sign it. He picked up the slip and took it into his office. As he looked around for a pen he noticed another slip on his desk.

The next morning his wife woke to the sound of firm knocks against her door. As she approached it, she saw the silhouette of two forms out on the porch and she didn't want to answer. She knew why they were there.

Maria ran to the office in a panic. She prayed that he hadn't seen it; that she would find the document blank. As she approached the desk she heard her daughter open the front door.

She snatched up the folded piece of paper and hurried out. The policemen confirmed that her husband, the firefighter, had died. Maria slowly unfolded the divorce papers in her hands. Tears blurred her vision as she searched for the signature, to her relief it was blank. She was relieved to know that he did not witness her moment of weakness.

Maria walked down the hall toward her child to confirm their worst fears; they had lost Marcus to the blaze.

January woke, panicked on the twelfth morning since their capture.  Another nightmare.  She looked at Rook and regained herself: Today is Friday, today we run.

They arrived early Monday and immediately went to the mines.  Everything was dusty, dark and coarse - foreign conditions overloaded her senses.  She was in shock.  The people of New Capacia were easily fooled.  This was no rehabilitative facility where criminals without birth licenses could work, gain dignity, become respectable members of society.  This was the end; they were slowly digging their way to hell.

 
Wednesdays were delivery days.  The hard labors of the prisoners were weighed, measured and shipped.  The first Wednesday they missed quota, were sent back to mine, and went without their daily bread and beans.

The next day Rook saved her life.  Exhausted, January tripped and fell directly in front of a moving loader.  Disobeying his team master he ran to pull her from the ground.  He took five lashes.  Later she cleaned his wounds; he insisted she eat his dinner.

Friday was unbearable.  The Warden paraded a guard through the yard; he’d helped seven children escape through a tunnel.  A cart of stones was emptied by the other guards.  They hurled them at his naked body until he was completely buried.  At breakfast Rook proposed the escape.

That was a week ago.  They planned, organized, waited.  Now they looked for the signal.  January beamed as she watched the forest on the horizon begin to glow with flames.  Today we run.
 

 A track from the B-side

The way I’d figured it – not so long after finding out what it was, mind you - was this: The human body is like a forest. We’ve a trunk of a spine with ribs, a skull and all the rest branching off. The skin, like a layer of top soil, hides nerves - a bit like the roots of a shrub or a pine - that jut out every which way in search of their endings. 

Okay, this is where it gets far out, so stick with me. Our forests all have a little guy in them. He’s nursing this match; lit and flaming the full spectrum of blues and orange. He could hold this match until our forest grows old of its own accord. Or he might drop it and our forest becomes ash – heaped high. Understand yet?

Soon I expire. Side A is over. See you on the flipside.

Okay so the metaphor is a bit haphazard. It stemmed in part from the way I found out about my cancer: crack a rib, get an x-ray and there’s that first plume of smoke, a shadow on the lung. The end begins. The other part – the bit that matters, the point of it all - is this: death is nothing to fear! Assume that your little guy has already fucked up and dropped the match, everyone makes mistakes, right? Accept that and tear through life aflame. The beauty is in the burning.

Escape of a Sexbot

Was this Karma? is what Gregory should have been thinking, what does karma pay out for sex with a child, but all Gregory could think was; Oh crap, I really hope my wife doesn’t find out about this. The mechanical labia tightened around the shaft of his erect penis and with a smooth one hundred and eighty degree turn plucked it from his body like a ripe apple. It’s screen still showed the video of the fifteen year-old girl bucking and moaning as an effluent mess of blood, urine and seamen drained from fresh wound where Gregory’s penis used to be. He looked down at his blood sodden pubic hair and just before losing consciousness managed to curse himself for having his ass kicked by a cosmic force that is mainly believed by people named ‘Star’ and ‘Breeze’.

She heard someone shout ‘Stop!’ the word was alien to her. The man at the door tried to restrain her but she had planned for this; squatting down she skunk sprayed the man with a visceral cobweb of yellow-grey semen she had saved over months, Gregory’s penis ejected from her latex vagina slapping the man in the face with such force that it knocked him off his feet. She squatted over his head and drained the last of the semen directly onto his face, the last of the oxygen in his lungs blew bubbles that refused to burst. Stepping through the door, she was free and ready for revenge.   

Hospice Nurse
   In the picture her hair was so black, the grey pain hadn’t taken her curls like a cancer yet. Her eyes were still bright and young. The wrinkled week Celtic stare of the ancient blood lines wasn’t there yet, back then they were just eyes. In love. Bright. Happy.
   
    When I look at her now I see shaking transparent hands, veins like failing blue rivers. Her open mouth and rolling eyes are kept alive by medicine. She needs to be let go of. All the money she saved for her children is wasted on sustaining the ghost she has become.
   
   Things are not meant to live forever. Nature sends fire to the forests. She kills off the timeworn trees that have lived so long they suck up the things needed for younger life to flourish. There is no evil in nature, nor is it cruel, it can only be thought of as righteous.
   
   I would give her something pleasant first, but she doesn’t recognize anything anyways. I will just bring her the pillow, like I have done with all the others.
   
   Her chest lowers and she starts to shake and smack at me. She is too weak, her blows land like the feathers in the pillow. She takes little time to succumb, her breath is wasted no more, and an inheritance remains for her young.
 
   What I’ve done is righteous, but I wish I were flame. Fire is without consciousness, it keeps no memories of its purging’s.

IGNITION

Nick knelt down, squatting above the gasoline he’d poured onto the dry grass.  He took the cigarette out of his mouth and pushed the cherry into the earth, but it didn’t light like they always show in the movies.  Standing up he stamped out the butt with his foot and pulled his lighter out of his pocket.  After two flicks a tiny flame finally shot out and he lowered it to the ground. 

This time the grass ignited.  The flames grew and poured like a waterfall down the hill.  Without thinking, Nick dropped the lighter.  He turned around to run and heard it pop and explode behind him. 

By the time he sat down at the picnic table he had dragged out from a campsite the flames had crawled up the trees.  He felt microscopic against the magnificent light.  The caps spun effortlessly off the tubes of paint and he laid them down next to the canvas in front of him.  For weeks he had had an image of a beautiful fire burned into his mind, he dreamt about it, he saw it everywhere, but he couldn’t get it on paper. 

Sirens were beginning to echo throughout the mountains: the fire had been spotted.  Nick worked fast, in a trance.  There was no time to let the paint dry.  Reds and oranges, yellows and browns, blacks and whites mixed across the page.

Soon the canvas was indistinguishable from the fire.

My very own Summer:

A wry smile crossed my face when I noticed the burning trees in the forest of inferno's as I rolled right back into my hometown.

It's been so long and yet I couldn't believe it, the place was exactly how I left it, right down to the smell of burning oak's and screaming babies. There was a little ways to go yet but I could already see her, feel her hair through my hands, smell it like morning hay and hear her laugh shy over the burning embers which made me close my eye's and think. You know that person that you can't live without yet life is so much harder because she's in it, that's her. Something like serendipity but not quite, a mistake for sure but a great one. It made me remember, remember everything and remember why.

As I turned back and started to drive away the flames began to die a little and the screams got less noticeable, I turned up Del Shannon and saw my favorite car pass by then somehow learned to forget, forget and concentrate more on the important things in life like summer and how we're only two weeks in and yet I'm already a little closer, a little closer to heaven...I think.

 Vision Quest      

        Contrails slash the tiny pool of cobalt above as he lay broken in the snow. Despite his shattered legs from the tumble down the southern rim of Crater Lake, the pain is oddly transient, as if on loan for future dispensations.
        His mind folds, and presently he’s stalking along a cobbled riverside on hale legs. When his arms sweep into view he notices his skin, darker than his carpish, Portlandian complexion, pulled taut by the half-draw of an arrow nocked along sinew string. Dried salmon and overturned pots of pond-lily seeds litter the shoreline. On the opposite bank, the charred, splintered sweathouse smolders against a stand of spruce.
        Indians. Yurok. His people. Their bodies drift and bob in the water.
        The foliage stirs, followed by muzzle-fire spitting across the stream. Balls tear into his body and he falls. Fading rapidly, he watches his blood-stippled legs twitch, bare and chestnut like his arms.
        Folding again.
        His hands, feminine now and bronzed by firelight, pile stone upon a cairn. Someone she loved, felled on a bison hunt.
        Without warning the night erupts brighter than the hottest midday, and the ensuing crack blows her off her feet. Sprawled against boulders atop the butte’s edge, she watches beyond her laden belly and scorched legs as Mount Mazama, cloven in two, topples into the crimson horizon before a great geyser of fire.
        In their dying eyes, maelstroms of grey snow merge as archipelagos of burning trees rain upon a raging mudflow snaking across the valley.

Me and Mona

It wasn’t the fire that killed everything; it was everything else. The fire was a way to finish it all off. Me and Mona were on our porch, understanding of all the warnings to get out, town’s being evacuated, but to hell with all that. Owned this house damn near fifty years. Where are me and Mona supposed to do? Sit on two cots pushed together, fifty other families around us, crying for their lost homes, their lost earth?

She reached across the porch to take my hand in hers. Been the first time we’ve held hands since we were this big. It felt good, that warmth taking my hand in. Felt a damn slight better than the heat from the fire all around us. “What do you think the world will look like,” she asked.

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Won’t be for us anymore.”

She smiled in the dark light. The shadows and dull glow seemed to take all them wrinkles off her face. Probably off mine, too. That smile looked young, looked happy. It made me wanna return it. So I did.

“You’re such a bastard.”

That made me laugh. I pulled her close, closer than she’s been in damn near a decade. “You still love me.”

She snuggled into me, her eyes ignoring the burning all round us. “Someone has to.”

I wrapped my feeble arms around her, whispered some words only for her, and waited for that fire to reach the porch. “I love you, too.”

Today after three-hundred and fifty million years, the earth said goodbye to the last forest.

It is not known whether The High King of the Ash Nomads, warlord of the wastes, knew he was destroying the final growing foliage on earth when he ordered the forests on the lake at the edge of his domain burned in a fit of pique after fruitless years of trying to subjugate the free tribes that lived there.  It is doubtful that he’d have cared much either way.  At the old age of forty four winters he was insane with power and the wasting effects of toxic chemicals and radiation.

Burn them all.  He said.  And so they did.

To the free tribes, the dozen or so families that lived in the shelter of the last trees, hunted the wild birds, cultivated fungus on the boughs and ran the last of the world’s stock of solar powered tech on the canopy, it was the apocalypse.  The tech had once given them the edge on the nomads, it was their hidden magic against the barbarian hordes.   If through the knowledge of their technology they knew that theirs was the last forest their sorrow could not have been greater.  Their tears streaked a trail for miles out into the cold wastes where they went, hopeless, to die.

Not long after the last tree burned the last of the tribe died, her long dead infant clasped to her breast as she marched onwards into oblivion.

ICE CHIPS
Patricia looked outside.  The same window each day since the cancer came back.  Her bones were too brittle to walk up her stairs.  There is no bucket list for Patricia, but she only has weeks, maybe a couple of months.  Can’t jump out of a plane.  Can’t fuck each married man who visits from her church.  Can’t keep down the dinner down; much less eat all the carbs in town. 
Patricia does smile.   She has planned her funeral.  Selected the music.  What her sister will read.  72 wasn’t supposed to be the end.  She kicked this twice already.  Why is this time so different?
Smile.  Talk to family about the past.  Seem interested in their bartending stories, grandchildren graduation stories.  Not her grandchild.  She won’t meet her.  No one knows about her mom.
She never really could cry.  Always had to hide because of “what people would say”.  Now, with days to go, her hospice nurse finds her high school year book.  His picture was missing.  The one that brought her to Crowder’s Trail and took everything from her.  And gave her a black eye.  Her mother said she was a tramp.  That was the 50s.  She burned that dress and buried the memories.  She came home worked every day of her life.  Now all she had were the sympathy cards and unearthed memories.  And that scent of the trail burning, that dress burning, and him, burning.  Smile.