The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Fire and Bones
by Kim Richards

The sky was on fire. Where striations of clouds used to be, long tendrils off orange and yellow flames reached across the atmosphere. The intense heat boiled the seas, long ago killing everything living below. It blistered the mountaintops, turning them into charred chunks devoid of life.

Nothing flew across the sky except for a lone island with a stone church situated on top. It bobbed and floated on the heat produced currents as though unaware of the turmoil above and below. Great cogs worked greater machines which kept it afloat and moving along. They clicked an whirred as they provided a protective bubble surrounding the land which was torn away from a cliff a century ago. Here the grasses grew green, the air was sweet; and the fires were unable to char anything.

The thing Norm became since the world burned shuffled across the floor of the abandoned sanctuary. The bones of his heels and toes clacked on the stones as he shambled. He was still hungry. There was nothing to satisfy him, just as there was no food or water at the time of his death. Still it drove him to roam, eternally searching for something to eat and drink.

He walked towards an open window sill and stopped when he bumped into the sill and wall. Seeing the ocean off in the distance, he pushed forward, toppling head first through the opening. With the unsteadiness of a toddler, Norm climbed to his feet.

His focus was on the ocean so he meandered towards it. He didn’t care if the water boiled; he just knew he needed to drink it.

He reached the edge of the floating island. The drop was a steep one; hundreds of miles down. Norm didn’t consider the fall, he just stepped forward…and hit an invisible wall. He tried again, bumping the protective bubble over and over. Then a stone from the crumbling church wall tumbled to the ground with a loud thump.

Norm turned his head and then the rest of his body. Something in the back of his semi-consciousness reminded him there was food in there once. A corpse he could gnaw upon and so he shuffled on back.

Fiction © Copyright Kim Richards
Image courtesy of Pixabay.