The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Luna’s Toll
by Kim Richards 

Nonie’s cell phone stopped working. She felt lucky it worked as long as it did. She guessed it took longer for its battery to die. Most everyone else’s went dark a few days ago. She laughed. That meant she couldn’t call her friends before now…since the cell phone structure went down. Where’s the luck in that?

Standing on a wooden dock, she clasped her hands behind her and watched the sun peak from the side of the moon. Old Luna filled most of the sky now, ever since The Event which shoved it nearer to the Earth. She came here to toss the useless phone into the water. She knew the act accomplished nothing. She just needed to let go of the last pieces of her ‘normal’ past.

The waters of the bay were finally calm and weak sunlight cast a fine sheen across the still surface. Large ships bobbed beneath the bridge in the water. They used to carry cargo containers but no more. No one needed floofy trinkets and things now days. The only thing people wanted now was to live.

Animals weren’t lucky either. Many in the wild died when the extremes of gravity escalated natural events. Confused, they couldn’t make sense of the tides and the wildly gyrating gravitational pull drove them mad. Flooding turned in to inland waves, crashing through buildings and burying everything in mud.

Nonie hoped the calm right now would last longer than before, although the severe quiet unsettled her. She wanted to stand here for hours but the stench of rotted vegetation and dead sea creatures made her dizzy. With a heavy sigh, she launched her phone into the air. It skipped across the water’s surface twice and then drowned.

Nonie turned on her heel and fled. Behind her the sounds of waves began. Hopefully she could make it to the bunker in time.

Fiction © Copyright Kim Richards
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com