Cities in Dust

400 word flash fiction, kind of sci-fiction-ish

The old world was gone. As far as her eyes could see was merely rubble. Cities of dust. When that world had been real, those cities had never been real. They had always been cities of dust. Of course, that world had never been real. At least it hadn't been real to Concordia. She had always been a dreamer of a different kind of world.She always wanted tomorrow, a different tomorrow than the society of the late 22nd century. To her, the world around her was meaningless and built on dust. She looked to the past, but also to the future for a chance to begin again.

Concordia sensed that she had been born in a time when things were going to rapidly change. Not change like all the changes of the 20th century like she knew of from history, but a real physical change. The earth would not be like it had been. All the old physical realities would vanish, she felt. But then Concordia thought that was silly . The world was so secure. What kind of "natural" disaster could destroy all the physical ''reality'''?  She wanted to destroy the world around her or live in her own world, because she was a dreamer and a visionary. But, also because she was a dreamer and a visionary, she thought that if she just waited, she would get a new world. The old world would be physically gone.

And one day it happened. The earth was reduced to cities of dust. The physical world was still there a bit, but so much of the landscape was leveled and it seemed like everyone was dead, everyone but her. But how did she know that?  She only knew the city she had lived in was gone, and nobody was alive. At least, after she opened her eyes, for the first time since the sky had turned so dark and the earth begun to shake, there was nobody there. She walked for miles around and there was no one there. She had no way to communicate with the rest of the world. However, she did not think there was a rest of the world. She thought she was almost the only one that had survived. Concordia went down to a river or what remained of it, and lay herself by it. She was too weak to go further yet.