Dust

• Anya Sills, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2019

Before the dust comes the static. Shots of electricity that zoom through the air, making your hair stand on end and the lights flicker. Then comes the silence. All sound extinguished as people, animals and insects run for cover. The entire world holding its’ breath, waiting for the onslaught. Finally, there’s the darkness, and, as the sun is blocked out by the clouds, it’s as if all the light in the universe has been sucked away.

I sit there, waiting for dust. The dust that surrounds you. That snakes its dry fingers through each and every nook and cranny, tearing reality away from you. No matter where you hide, it finds you. Nothing can prevent its coming. And that’s the reason why people leave. All the sane ones anyways. Not us though. Not me. We used to try, back when I was little. I remember the first time; a day much like today. If you couldn’t see the death that surrounded us, didn’t know about the dust, you would have thought it looked…almost normal. The car was packed, all of us ready. And we drove, as fast and as far away as we could possibly go. A lot of good that did us. We lasted 30 minutes; then came the static. The silence. The darkness. The dust. 2 days we were stuck in that car. Covered by dust, struggling to breath. Finally, the onslaught ended, and we turned back, not able to make the rest of the trip.

There’s a crack of static and the light above my head flickers into darkness. I sit there and remember the second time. Maybe 3 months after the first. That try we lasted a whole hour before the storm. For the next 16 months, every opportunity we got we tried to leave. Eventually we just gave up. Might as well wait it out, we thought. But now I wonder, how long will we have to wait? How long until there’s no more static. No more silence. No more darkness. How long?