STORY - Taken All Back

So this is another rapid fire story, a story written on a day that I thought was good but hadn't seen enough done. A day where I wondered about the world a bit. And so in the end, 30 minutes ago, I wrote this.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14.04.2012

Taken All Back

And the human race had passed the point of no return and the powers that be -

Sat in their halls where the indigo edge of the universe pushes out into the infinite, they judged world after world, and some were found wanting. Including ourselves. We had wasted all the wonderful opportunities we had, and squandered resources that we had no idea were remarkably rare in the universe as a whole. We were choking ourselves in smog amongst dying waters.

And so, they began to remove them from us. To redistribute. To farm out to the more worthy.

Women went first. On a world destined to die, their breeding capacity was not required. The men woke one frighteningly nice day all over the world, to find their beds empty and a lump at the lower end of their rib cage. They barely had time to cry, for then they noticed all the animals that stalked the land were disappearing; no trace left, not a footprint. The mighty tiger to the tiniest worm, all gone, in strict alphabetical order, in a day.

Man was deliberately left to watch all of this happen.

The next day, as the sun passed above the waters, rising in the east across the succeeding time zones, every fish, every whale, dolphin, crustacean and lowly jellyfish in the sea disappeared. A few fishing boats, out of communications with the land, realised things were majorly amiss at sea when they hauled up totally empty nets without even a lowly starfish in the mesh. Without knowing of the devastations on shore, they lamented.

Then the next rotation of the Earth, the plants were gone, leaving nothing but dust. Every tree, flower, shrub, bush and moss disappeared the moment the morning rays illuminated them. Man watched was left of his food suddenly disappear from fridge and pantry. Those who could register such events, in their madness.

But still they were spared.

Next, night fell, and no stars rose. No planets shone out. All was as dark as the hardest coal. And man was wetting the dust with tears. The next day the sun never rose at all, and sometime after that, could have been a day, who can tell with no sun rising, and all technology disintegrating into molecules before eyes that couldn't see them in the dark.

And then the waters swirled away into nothing, and the last thing the men felt was the world disappearing from beneath their feet, to be taken away and shaped elsewhere into a home for a better species.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14.04.2012