365 Ficlets - #125 ~ "Country Living"

Once more I am awake in the dark of the night. Since the cities fell I have found it hard to sleep. None of us know when or if the fighting will find its way out into the countryside, but the lack of gun ownership, even out here, has got people worried. Some are saying that it is only a matter of time until they start to move out looking for survivors and food, others that they are going to assume everyone died, that the fallout simply laid waste to the land. I am not sure either way, but here I sit, unable to sleep, watching out into the dark, looking for lights moving towards us. They are clearly good at what they are doing, there is no way that they would announce their coming, so why do I sit here, night after night.

Long ago I had hated that I lived so far away from the bright lights, the theatres and the galleries. The problem with country living was always being left with just the local am-drams and a mobile library. Now that isolation is the reason I am alive, that my family is alive. I need to sleep.

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This does not yet appear on ficlets.com due to a technical problem with that site and its OpenID login, i.e. I can't get on the site, logged in.

This Ficlet was partly inspired by a suggestion / thought from kt_peasant, but I am not sure that I have really done what she suggested, I already had a crack at it two days ago, this is an alternative approach.

365 Ficlets - #126 ~ "Cruel Fate"

James looked at her again, hoping to see just the flicker of recognition in her eyes. There was a whole room of people between them and it was at least a year since they had last spoken, but he could not help but hope that she would want to break that record. She made eye contact with him for just a moment and then turned away to talk to the older man standing next to her; a moment later she flashed James a look that said quite unequivocally “stay away from me”.

He still did not know what he had done, or more to the point he did not know why he was in the doghouse with her; all that he had done was be straight with her about his feelings. Sure there are those who might say that her attachment to his cousin made those feelings inappropriate, but he had thought she would be able to see that he knew that feeling a certain way for her did not mean that he expected anything of her. Clearly he was wrong; he had never seen her so angry as that night when he had told her.

Why was this his fate? To him it seemed cruel.

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This does not yet appear on ficlets.com due to a technical problem with that site and its OpenID login, i.e. I can't get on the site, logged in.