Extinction

Authors Purpose (optional)

This story was originally written as a school project.
During class, my English teacher at the time interviewed us about our pieces of creative writing; our overall purpose, our use of techniques, what we were writing about and why we were doing so. For previous pieces, I found this aspect of the work quite annoying, as we were seemingly wasting time we could be spending on writing.
But after writing my first piece of the year, I realised that my peers had been writing gory, in-depth, depressing stories; about wars or exaggerations of the current pandemic.
So when it came to me writing my second piece, I gave myself a little more free-rein to do what I wanted and see where it lead me. And it began with my authors purpose:

The purpose of this Short Story is to practise a first person narrative whilst also describing how the world ends.

This piece is based off of a prompt that my peer Ethan gave me when I asked him for one. He gave me the word 'extinction' and instead of his interpretation of dinosaurs and meteors, I had the image of characters running away from a dark mist; I then wrote the story around it.

The story is in the perspective of an unnamed character and their acceptance of Liam as they prepare to begin life in the apocalypse.

The character is nameless because their identity doesn't add anything to the narrative and also helps the reader immerse and self-insert themselves into the story. It also acted as an experiment to see if I could write a good piece of writing with a gender-less character.