The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Tequila Sunrise 
by Suzanne Madron 

.The burnoff cloud on the horizon was getting closer. It would have been beautiful if he didn’t understand what it meant. Ignorance would have been bliss in this one instance, to be able to enjoy the swirl of colors reaching and grasping across the sky like a daytime Borealis.

Staring at the damned thing was starting to hurt his head, he realized, like trying to discuern a picture from a 3D puzzle, but much worse. The burnoff cloud moved with sentience, incinerating everything in its path. He was quite literally watching the world burn.

He checked his watch. It was an old analog wind-up. No batteries to melt or die. He wiped his sweat from the cracked face and noted the cloudy date and time.

By his calculation, he had been running from the end of the world for three days. Today, he had reached the end. He climbed the last cliff to the last surviving tree and sat in its meager shade.

He opened his pack and removed the bottle of tequila. He had saved it for a special occasion. If the end of the world wasn’t a special occasion, he didn’t know what was. He began to drink, chugging the alcohol as best he could as he felt his eyelashes curling. The skin of his face felt tight, too tight, still blistered from the other times he had gotten too close or had moved too slow.

Below him, the ocean steamed as the burnoff cloud swirled in the sky above it. Behind him was charred and blackened earth, scorched from where it all began.

He continued to drink, staring up at the sky at the swirling cloud, and watched the world burn.

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Fiction © Copyright Suzanne Madron
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Suzanne Madron:

For Sale or Rent

The house across the street seems to go on the market every few months, but this time nothing about the sale is normal, including the new owners. No sooner has the for sale sign come down and the neighborhood is thrown into a Lovecraftian nightmare and the only way to find out is to attend the house warming party.

Available on Amazon!