The “Shortly After” Writing Challenge
I thought it would be fun to start a little writing challenge.
The steps are easy:
- Find a random image on Unsplash (I used a random word generator to inspire my search)
- Referencing the image, write a short story (< 500 words) starting with the words: “Shortly after…”
I’ll go first:
Shortly after, the world ended.
It was long thought that cats held some kind of higher power, but nobody expected that power to be a latent reserve of the universe’s missing anti-matter. It turns out their indifference to humans was merely a symptom of their ability to channel a river of multidimensional stimuli. Compared to the infinite galactic knowledge they received on a daily basis, simply put, cats found humans pretty boring.
Elysia had painted her nails black that summer, her first act of rebellion against the patriarchy since she wore a suit to prom. She’d just finished her first year of uni, and was using phrases like transcendental idealism. Her summer project would be volunteering for the local animal shelter, helping with their feline TNR (trap-neuter-release) programme. In an effort to reduce the suffering of local kittens, Elysia, on a Sunday in July at 11:13am, accidentally reduced the suffering of all cats —in fact, all creatures.
Shortly before, a black alley cat had crawled onto a ledge to rest. After a day of what probably looked like routine ennui, the alley cat had in truth been portalling through a vast equation, calculated between two colliding black holes. The mathematical sequence unlocked the cat’s reserve of antimatter, but thankfully a series of protective bosons situated between his antimatter reserve and all the matter in and around him prevented instant galactic destruction.
Unfortunately, chemists had formulated OPY’s latest black nail varnish “Ashes to Ashes” with an isotope of potassium derived from bananas, multiplied and then compounded to get the “blackest black” varnish on the market. There was no way to know that this particular isotope was capable of reversing specialized integer spins and fermion depletion that would result in the unraveling of a cat’s boson protection from its anti-matter chamber. So when Elysia raised her hand to the cat and brought with it her black-painted fingernails, she was only thinking about what Marx would have said about stray cats, and whether being vegan was realistically sustainable in her friend group.
But none of that would matter. Shortly after, the world ended.
Please tag me if you write a “Shortly After” so I may add you to the story list. It will help spread the fun if you’re able to link to this story or the Shortly After list, as well as nominate other writers!
I’d like to nominate some of the authors I read most often or have recently discovered: Roman Newell, C. L. Nichols, Author, Ulf Wolf, Anna Soldenhoff, Jo Letke, Logan Spector, missmedieval, Bruno T., Ash Moses, Scarlet Ibis James 🦩, Maisie Archer.
