Last Night I Fell

By Colt Morrell

Its been three years since the cities fell.

And so did I.

My only reminders are the pictures I keep.

Some of family,

Some of friends,

My past kept on this little plastic thing, but not in my mind.

A reoccurring image stains my mind, a dream or a memory?

Of a woman screaming as the forests dances a blaze, an a hooded man stands in front of me.

Almost as if hes inciting me to fight, fight against the blade he carries in his hand.

For what reason I cant remember why I have this vision, but still it haunts my brain.

Theres a memento of a violent act left as a scar that lays across my temple like a parting of waves.

No reason to think of these things further, the night approaches and I grow weary from the exhaustion of my journey.

My journey west, to something that can ignite the memories in my head.

1

The world is gray and red, red from the dried blood of corpses and the raging fires that have consumed the cities and forests alike.

The gray comes from the ashes of these fires and the decaying, burnt corpses that plague the ground.

I have yet to meet another soul in months, it feels like.

Some of the others who come across my journey tend to be cherishful with my condition, by helping me navigate my way and giving whatever supplies they see fit to share.

The others try to take advantage of my loss of memory and wish to take my belongings for their own, Im not sure if any of them are still alive afterwards.

Some of them, men, called me a murderer.

As I awoke to greet another day I see that I found refuge in a small shack that was just large enough for one person and sat in the middle of the road, an odd place to put a building.

In the wake of the clouds that consumed the sky above me I was still able to see the gigantic structures of a city scape on the horizon ahead of me, the device on my wrist pointed it’s red arrow west. The road would lead me there. A small, black block was strapped to the shoulder of my backpack and had a cable dangling down from it that somehow charged the plastic devices that I carried with me. Most importantly it charged the camera, where my past resided. I opened the camera often and slid through the pictures on it. The photos contained both exciting and dull images, which I adored regardless. Most of the pictures had something in common: there was me, and there was a woman. It looked like we shared something closely.

I knew nothing of the people on the camera, everyone besides myself was a mystery, but the people always seemed happy when they were around me. There was one picture which I loved the most, the photo of the same woman who I shared something with, staring out of a window of room that was clean from any ash and her body exposed to the elements. Like an angel to my soul.

The thought of the woman, my angel, was the one thing I cherished in my exiled existence from the world with a normal life.

Now the road was beginning to deepen more with debris and ash the closer I got to the city ahead of me. There was a set of footprints in the ash from a soul who travelled here before he and made a path in the road that would be convenient to follow. Vehicles, the corpses of its passengers and the crumbling debris of concrete were scattered across the road which I travelled and made it difficult to navigate my way towards the city in the places where I could no longer follow the footsteps.