The Red Chair
Our town is empty now. Helicopters clatter back and forth across the sky like great winged predators.
Our town is empty now — the streets are vacant, the air acrid and thick. Blue smoke rises in the distant forest and fields. Menacing helicopters clatter back and forth across the sky like great winged predators.
The family next door were the last of my neighbors to evacuate. They took what they could, and at the last minute, they left behind in the street, a chair, a nice red chair.
No one ever imagined that this kind of thing could happen to our country, in a small town like ours. Anyway, I’m not leaving. I’ve lived alone here my whole life. Where would I go?
No voices are heard in the street now, no barking dogs, no rattle of cooking pans or children laughing – only a small flutter of confused birds and the hollow echo of my own halting steps on the pavement.
Last week, friends on bicycles with bread in the baskets came along this way, young couples strolled with their arms around each other, cats blinked in sunny doorways. Now heavy trucks clad in brown canvas rumble through our narrow lanes, scattering explosives where they will, laying waste to homes — and for what?
I’m just closing my window and waiting. I’m counting the blessings of my long life. Considering the vast and random nature of the universe, it is a miracle that I could have lived at all!
If they come, they will find me right here, sitting and waiting in my new red chair.
So quiet, elegant and calm. I love how it leaves so much to the imagination.
Very nice, Sharron. I believe such a thing can happen. We live in "interesting times".