Writing Prompt: Evolution
Changing Course
When Staying the Course Is No Longer Enough
As with everything in this life, it started with a choice.
When her family was killed during the first purge, she chose to turn and walk away. She remade her existence into one relentless movement, placing one foot in front of the other. She set the course and nothing else mattered.
She walked straight, never ceasing, never changing.
Her feet traced new paths across valleys where tall, wind-whipped grass swayed and whispered secrets of a lost world.
They trudged through snow-covered fields, thick and biting, where each step was a struggle.
She pushed through storms powered with wind and rain that cut the air and crushed the earth beneath her.
She labored through war-torn cities cradling its starving, beaten citizens that reached out with desperate eyes.
Not once did she stop.
Not even when tiny hands gripped her tattered clothes and begged.
Her gaze remained fixed straight ahead, unwavering, unseeing.
Even now, as the Earth trembled with its last breaths and her kin were nothing but bone crushed to ash under her feet, she walked. One dirt-covered, skin-cracked foot followed the other.
She counted the steps, chanting the numbers in her head as if in prayer. Each step a sacred offering meant to drown out the despair clawing at her mind, the ache suffocating her chest, the relentless sting in her muscles.
One billion thirty-four million five hundred sixty-five thousand seven hundred eighty-three, One billion thirty-four mill-
Her steps faltered. A small hitch that, for a moment, broke through her rhythmic trance.
Before her stood the home she had abandoned long ago. It was more worn and weary than she remembered, leaning heavily as if ready to vanish into the earth. Yet, with windows cracked and weathered wood chipped, it still stood holding within it the ghosts of a broken, murdered family.
She pushed her legs forward ignoring the heaviness spreading throughout her body.
Just keep walking. Keep on the course. Don’t look back, she whispered.
She laughed bitterly.
Don’t look back, she scoffed. It’s right here in front of me. I walked all this way to it.
She reached the end of the dirt path leading up to the porch steps. Her breath came in ragged gasps, her muscles trembling with exhaustion.
It was there that her feet stopped walking and the world seemed to pause with her, holding its breath.
With a shudder, she sank to her knees, pressing them firmly into the ground as she dug her hands into the dirt. Holding the world in a death-grip, she closed her eyes and cried. Her tears fell freely, burning as they traced paths down her cheeks, searing into her skin and bones, and bled into the earth, scarring new rivers into its crust.
She cried until she had nothing left to give. With her tears, she shed the weight of her grief drowning the house and burying it fully into the marked earth.
Body spent and hollowed out, she made one last choice.
She relinquished her body to this rotting, aching world allowing her soul to drift into the continuum in search of a better time, a kinder Earth, a different course.
Written for Microcosm’s Prompt: Evolve. Get the newsletter to stay up to date.
