The Black Octopus Came And Swallowed The Sky

A short, abstract description of two unconnected characters living in a dark world. Go to http://andrewhenleywriting.wordpress.com for more of my writing.

A young woman wears sunglasses over eyeless, gaping wounds in her face. She cannot see it, but the ground she walks on is clay with an orange hue, a butterscotch landscape. Her foot wobbles with every carefully rehearsed step.  Her thin, crooked mouth is an upward crescent, but not a smile. Trees are now bare hat racks. Leaves form a rotting, autumn carpet all year round. The red beacon of a Coca-Cola can glows and glares amongst a gang of purple dahlias. Fatigued flowers. She glances at it, the way she still glances at everything around her, but those empty sockets can no longer take anything else in. They are too full. The last thing they absorbed was the blueness of the sky. The clouds, the sun, the rain and wind, they have all been consumed by a million blind sockets. It disappeared.

 

On the same street but in a different world, an old man sits in a room with a typewriter. The florescent lights crackle and spit above him. His fingers like asps, he types as the lights complain. The room was the brilliant white of a coma patient’s dying vision. It could be a corporate office, were it not for the total lack of west wall that exposed the man and his forgotten legacy to all that remained of existence. Metal bars, twisted and torn like the legs ripped from insects, jutted out of the open wall in the shape of question marks. Their flailing arms could not catch the west wall as it crumbled. No one could catch anything. The man typed nothingness, endless gibberish. The typewriter’s buttons were stepping stones to nowhere. Nowhere new. He removed each letter littered sheet and balled it up. He tossed them towards a wastepaper bin, already mountainous with snowballs of false literature. Eventually he wrote the same thing he wrote every day.

 

‘The black octopus came and swallowed the sky.’