Dark Smoke

• Saxon Krnel, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2014

A dark Smokey sky with a dirty haze on the horizon columns of smoke rising into the dead sky choked with pollutants.

From a window a man watches it all looking down to the clouds below, hiding the lower city from sight with stormy polluted curtains. Closing his eyes he remembers what it all used to be…… Beautiful blue sky with soft clouds and a green lush ground fills his memories.

But then like a poison dark memories spread through his thoughts, death, plague and violence. Some of the many horrors he had persevered through and then finally…. The war. It was supposed to be the one that ended everything. To unite a divided world and usher in a new age of peace and prosperity for its people.

But they forgot the bombs. Shuddering as he remembered the day they fell the man opened his eyes and gazed out at the bleak and lifeless buildings near and far standing like black obelisks in the clouds. Holding and protecting the last of humanity in their depths. Lifting them high above the once fertile and beautiful land that they called home and protecting them from the dead radioactive landscape it was now.

With sadness the man closed his eyes and thought back to the events after the bombs fell, days of hard labour and desperation as humanity choked on the effects of their own weapons. Struggling to breathe and survive while building higher and higher to escape the now dead and dangerous surface of their world.

Looking down at his hands the man examines the calluses and scars of his work. Days upon days of work in the factories producing some essential need for humanities survival in the sky. His lungs blackened by soot and chemicals the cancer ravaging his body from constant exposure to radiation.

But now there is peace, a peace that he had struggled and fought for with the desperation of a dying man. And finally at the end of his efforts a peace that cost the man his family his friends and his home……

But now humanity was united and working together to ensure survival. The man breathed in his last pollutant filled breath and left the world above the world and with one last sad and desperate thought “what now?” collapsed to the ground as dead as the land thousands of meters below him.

So on went the world in the sky not able to go down only up as the spreading radiation chased them closer and closer to the stars where in ramshackle generation ships they would flee to in hope of finding a new world a better world in which to have a second chance.

Time: -7641743
Planet: Mars