The End

The world has been under the rule of Europe for almost a decade. It started when Ana was only three. They came on ships and under the flag of truce, asking to talk to our president. The president, Simon the 3rd insisted on bringing the military with him. Suspicious, since the United States just finished a war with Europe.

            Although she was only three, the day the president went out to see stuck out like a sore thumb in her memories. She was watching Arthur, her favorite. Ana, her mom, and dad watched it together every day at 4:00 pm; they all sat on the same couch in a living room painted pale blue with pictures of Ana, and relatives hanging on the wall. The couch was big, red, and squishy, mom and dad had to sit on either side of Ana to keep her from sinking into it. Right when D.W. was going to ask Arthur if she could join his club, the channel  went fuzzy; on the television appeared a strange man in a very strange room, the whole U.S. military force standing behind him with a hidden figure at his feet, out of view by the camera. The room itself was farther than the eye could see and about as tall as a two story house; wall’s where a dark gray with a white mold along the edges of the sealing; the floors covered in a pale green slimy substance. Each man in the military was tied to a pole along the sides of the room, stretching from sealing to floor, in groups of five or six, with two or three guards per group. As the strange man began to talk, my parents’ faces started to turn whiter and whiter. Suddenly the camera turned to the man on the floor, the one that was out of view. Then it went back up to the talking man above him. When this happened, Ana's mother started crying, at first silently so no one would notice. But then it got louder and louder. Ana's dad said to wait one minute and he her mother out of the room.

            “Lilee, you have to be brave, we knew this was going to happen, I can understand why you’re upset, but we need to put on courageous faces for our daughter. Jim messaged me from Europe last week saying that the king was being very strange.”

            "Mike, you saw what they did to the president. I knew it would happen, but it was just so soon. What are we going to do! What if they start to kill us, what happens then? I can’t live knowing that someone killed Ana, our daughter.”

            "Neither could I. but like I said we have to be brave. There’s an outpost run by Marcus Ariston, up in northern Minnesota.  We’ll just have to go little earlier than we planned. If we stay here Ana will die."

            “Shhhhhhh! We don’t want her to hear us. It will just make her more scared than she already is.”

            “Mommy," Ana whimpers, “why is there a dead man on the TV?” The camera had turned back to the man on the floor.

             “Look away it’s just a fake TV show it’s not real, don’t worry about it.” Ana's mother insisted.

            What Ana didn’t know at the time was that the dead man on the floor, was the president, and The United States was once again part of the European rule.