Short Stories and Poetry

A World of Less

   The sound cascaded around her much like a waterfall does, loud, violent, yet beautiful all at the same time. Her hands shake as the world seemed to collapse around her, the fiery destruction not lost in her dying eyes. As she lay on the broken concrete, with a broken body she admires her handiwork, laughing as her consciousness fades to where her sanity left to long ago. A world of less left in her wake, less hope, less brilliance, and most important of all less of sanity. She dies, her legacy permently left as a scar that will never heal, and her remorse was dry as bone.

   Across the city the hero stands defeated but not dead. His world is one of less, less family, less friends, and less accomplishment despite his long known nemesis being cleaved of her life by the cruel and merciful scythe of Death. The hero stands in a world not worth living, he pulls out a gun, a simple object not capable of killing him in someone else's hands, but only his own. He puts it to his temple and pulls the trigger, the shot resonating through the fiery destruction.

   Our protagonist sits, legs crossed on the remains of their childhood home. The building that once housed a lifetime of memories, not all good, not all bad, is now reduced to a pile of grey ash. The home of a family who had each other, now seem to hold only one thing in common, Death. For our protagonist life is also not worth living, but instead of giving themselves the relief of being reunited with their loved ones, they are pulled to their feet by a friendly face. And with arms wrapped across each other's necks they limp out of the ruins and into the world that they must now live in, a world of less.