Pressed Opened

Pressed Opened

I was cold all the time. When I slept, it was with my back in the corner, my legs tucked under me. I woke often to the furious shaking of my body.

It took me three days to learn how to build a fire. Sickly and small, I fed it the thin blue twigs I found on the forest floor.

At night, snuffling creatures would snarl and bump at the door and I would scream nonsensically, howling and growling with a garden spade in my hand.

In the daylight I would forage. Nothing was familiar but I learned the bitter yellow berries were safe to eat while the red nuts that smelled like cinnamon made me sick with fever and swelling. The small purple berry on the pink-leafed bush was a hallucinogen of sort and I hoarded those jealously.

I set traps daily. The last of my twine was used to set snares against the trees. I dug holes and placed sharpened sticks in them, hoping the bits I remembered from camping and TV would coalesce into a meal.

My brain was on autopilot. I refused to think of what happened to my family. My mind skittered around how my little gardening shed and I ended in the middle of nowhere. I refused to look at the two blue moons hanging in the sky.

When I caught my first animal, one of the snuffling beast that mis-stepped and fallen into the pit next to my house, I killed it with a rock and roasted its haunches over the small green fire.

I took one bite and vomited violently.

In the morning, I gathered my small collection of berries into a knapsack fashioned out of my gardening apron, filled my watering can and plugged it with a sponge, and set off in the direction of the flashing blue lights I saw every night.

It was dark before I got close and I stumbled out of the woods into a clearing. There was a man waiting in the center. He was big, ripped with muscles that threatened to bulge out of his armored uniform. His skin was red with mottled gray. His eyes were a single slit of blue flashing light.

My thoughts screamed and left and I stood there dumbly abandoned.

He strode over and gripped my head with his taloned hand.

YOU ARE LAST.

YOU LEADER TO THE HUMANS, THEY CALLED YOU…

He hesitates, the flashing lights of his eyes briefly still.

THEY CALLED YOU, LEADER. PRESIDENT?

I close my eyes. What of my people? I dare myself to hope…

He grips my head tighter and shakes me.

UNDERSTAND ME HUMAN, I WILL SAY THIS ONCE.

YOUR LIFE IS NO MORE. YOUR HUMANS ARE DEAD. YOUR PLANET IS A BURNING ROCK.

I felt his hands squeeze harder. Sharp pain. I felt something crack and shift.

YOU ARE TROPHY. SOUVENIR.

He let go and I fell limply to the ground. My head struck something and I heard it distantly.

Faintly, I heard a snort of disgust as he walked away.

I felt my head shift back, the pain fading. Mounting horror rose to bile in my chest as my skull began healing – the fragmented pieces knitting together. My mind shifted back to the days I went without food and water, the freezing temperatures that I somehow survived.

He began to laugh.

NOW YOU UNDERSTAND.

He picked me up with a clawed finger and flung me over his shoulder. He headed back towards the garden shed.

TROPHY WILL NOT BREAK.

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