Sarah Bearclaw strode to the door, a gun pressed into her back. She bit her tongue to keep her mouth shut.

She had so much to say. Why was this happening? What does he know about the Sphere of Fire she doesn’t? She is a archeologist after all! And why did that kind man have to die?

Sarah collided with the door, bruising her forehead and causing her nose to bleed.

“Are you as blind as you are annoying? The door was right there!” Zion snapped.

“Oh my lord, shut it will you— It’s hard to focus with a GUN pressed against my spine!”

Zion widened his eyes. “Those are some big words for a little woman.”

“DON’T EVEN START!!” Sarah growled, forgetting he had the gun. “This world thinks that men can just say this horrible thing to us like we don’t care— you can’t just say that! Not after killing a stranger and holding me at gunpoint! If you want me to shut up, then you should too!! Or else this kidnapping is about to get reversed.”

Zion looked taken aback. “Damn lady. Just walk out the door.” He pocketed the gun and pushed her out the door, huffing, not wanting to be quiet, but not wanting to see what Sarah meant.

“You’re… weird.” He finally mumbled. “Get in the car.” Grabbing her wrist, he threw her in the passenger seat of a red pickup.

She looked out the window, knowing where ever he was headed would not end well.

🩵 Yep, Sarah talks to him like she’s not held at gunpoint!! Kinda risky, but YES FOR STANDING UP FOR THE GIRLS 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻

One morning Toby Freedman received a phone call that would change the course of someone’s life. The ID was unfamiliar. He almost didn’t answer.

“Hello.”

“Toby? It’s Allison.”

She sounded distressed. Did she know about mom? “Allison, I needed to talk to you two years ago!”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have my own phone, and they don’t like me to use this landline. It’s for their business.”

He could hear her sniffing as if she was crying. Thinking that if she hung up he wouldn’t be able to reach her again, he gentled his voice and hid his anger.

“Mom needed you…”

“How is she?”

“Dead.”

“Oh, God.” It was a long time since Allison had thought of her mom. Her mom had pushed her to get out on her own. She remembered her as never needing anyone. “I’m sorry.” She didn’t ask for details, because she was distracted by an urgent need to flee.

He wanted to say you should be, but he remained silent and waited for her next words.

“They”—she took a deep breath and lowered her voice to a whisper—“want us to eat poison.” Tears ran down her cheeks, and her lips quivered. She loved these people, and they loved her.

“Huh?” Toby didn’t believe what he heard.

Allison had second thoughts about telling him. She had never wanted to make them look bad to Toby. She had been hoping he would join, too, one day, along with their parents. Now, because she felt afraid, she was ruining it. This wasn’t how higher level beings behaved. Why couldn’t she just act like one of them? Why didn’t she have peace about going to meet the TELAH beings, like everyone else did. Why did the simple joy she felt in their presence evaporate? Now her heart was pounding, and her old low-level self was trying to escape its evolution.

“Are you still there?”

“It’s time for graduation from the human evolutionary level,” she quoted their website to him, hoping that if it sounded good to Toby, then she would be able to go through with it. There was only a few days left before takeoff.

“Do you even care?” Toby asked, still thinking about their mother. He’d tried years ago to talk his sister out of quitting her job, selling her stuff, and moving away with that cult. It was such a waste of her life. He sighed and gave up. “What’s wrong?”

When Toby said the word “wrong” it was like a drumbeat in her heart got loud and hard, thumping in resonance. She felt like her brain and her body were betraying her. She looked around to make sure she was still alone. “I need help.” It was difficult to say that. She couldn’t imagine how he could help. He didn’t understand.

“I’ll send you a plane ticket.” Toby thought he could probably get Dad to chip in with that.

She was supposed to go up in her ascended body and through Heaven’s gate, not backwards on a plane to a life without a purpose. Without her team. “I don’t…”

“You do!” Toby interrupted with passionate certainty. “You need to come back. You get yourself on that bird, honey, and you fly into the **sky **to your freedom, and you never look back!”

—

Toby didn’t understand until it was too late that the group meant to kill themselves. He would have called the cops. Allison didn’t understand for years that they had needed intervention. Instead of being instantly relieved, she went through months of dealing with a feeling of guilt that fear had driven her away from them, and that was lower-level thinking. She couldn’t have intervened herself. She was too indoctrinated. She doubted her own perceptions.

Gradually, Allison regained most of her footing thanks, in part, to Toby and her dad.There was still the occasional night when she’d look up at the starry skies and think wistfully of alien beings, but she kept that to herself. What she admitted to Toby was that she was wrong.

End

Note: Although this is a work of fiction, with entirely fictional characters, it is inspired by real life events. Heavens Gate was a real cult. Thirty-nine people were convinced to eat poison pudding or applesauce and die.

This joy laid to waste, these mountains, lakes, plains, forests, destroyed by the poison from the sky. We call it farang, it means ‘home stealer’, we call it that because it stole our home, our lifestyle. There will be no more travelling from place to place, following the season. There will be no more hunting or foraging.

‘They stole our homes, they poisoned our skies, they caused our people to die, our food sources to deplete, it’s time we fight back, we poison their skies, steal their homes, take their food, kill their people.’ ‘Revenge!’ The people chant, again and again, but then we go home. Home along set paths that they laid out, home being permanent, claustrophobic, determined by them. We do nothing.

I doubt any of us have loosed an arrow for weeks, or spoken our language. I hate it, maybe even more than the others. I accept it just the same.

The sky is dark just like my heart Joy has become a waste time a poison in the virgin wine the sky is dark my life has barely a start and yet i feel so void of art and now i’ll sit as my thinking starts

i know you have regrets. small ones: like saying the wrong thing, tripping, wearing the wrong shoes. big ones: waiting; ignoring; wasting; hating. regrets are like poison.

if i told you, that you could go back and change them, what joy you would feel. how ecstatic!

there is a condition. there is always a condition.

you cannot cling to the regret, to that moment. you cannot think about it every time you’re in public. you cannot lie awake at night, wishing with your whole heart that you could undo it.

your regretful memory must be almost forgotten before you are allowed to change it. you might be looking at the stars on the sky one day, and suddenly you will remember this terrible regret!

and so you work for it. anything to change this mistake you made! you forget about it. you think about other things. you live your life how it is.

and then, when i come to inform you that you can finally go back and change it, i will laugh in your face.

because i know what your answer will be.

_ no need; i have already let it go!_

The stars were beautiful tonight. They spanned the night sky; glimmering like jewels on black velvet. In this moment I stood in awe of the majesty before me. A sense of pure childlike joy washed through me. I am alive. I’m all of the universe, among the hundreds of thousands of galaxies, I am here. My existence can’t be a waste because it is a miracle that I am even here. It would have been easy to not exist but I did it. No thoughts of depression, or dread, can poison this moment. I made it, I am made of stardust and filled with life. I do not need a purpose or a god, I just am. That is enough.

I’ve tried to wipe the image from my mind— of her, in that casket, pale and dead as a ghost.

I try and I try, but it won’t go away. The emotionless face, the eyeless sleep.

That wasn’t her. I tell myself, cold. It wasn’t her. I knew her— a living, breathing being, with flowing blood and flowing laughte_r. I knew her. _

The sky is always cold and grey— at least, that’s what it is in my eyes. There are not enough souls in the world, not anymore. There is not enough life, and there never will be again. Not ever.

The people are nothing but faceless masks, soundless words, long dead feelings. They are nothing, and neither am I.

I am sitting on a bench, and I hear a small sound—

_Mrrow? _

It’s a bony black cat, his face holding two yellow moons that lock my gaze.

My chest is seared with pain, and I turn myself away from the pitiful creature. I can’t, and won’t, think about those animals.

I get up and walk home.

It follows me. I hear wiry pawsteps on concrete, and hoarse, quiet mewing. It goes to leap through my door and I almost kick it— my foot held stiffly over its head, my eyes back over its tortured face. But I lower myself, and I slam the door.

The next day yeilds two more, following behind me, singing their crying, dying voices. White and orange, orange and black. Crooked whiskers and desperate eyes.

The day after that there are five— striped and gray, blue-eyed white. They cry, louder and louder, begging me, screaming for me, waiting for me. I try to ignore them but they won’t stop. I see them when I close my eyes. I hear them when I sleep.

The fourth day there are eight.

They’re haunting me.

Like echoes of her voice, dark tendrils of her hair, lithe, withered fragments of her body.

I try to shoo them away but all they do is circle back, whining and moaning, their ribs heaving through their sides. They’re starving, and they’ll die without her.

I’ve considered speeding up the process. Poison, antifreeze. Fox traps, maybe, though that seems too gruesome. But I reserve myself— that would be too callous, even for me. They can waste away by themselves, and then this will all be over. She will leave me.

She loved those cats. She’d bring them something every morning— stroke their faces, while I watched her through the window. Then she’d come inside and kiss me on the cheek, tell me, _Casper is doing well today! And Georgie has brought one of her kittens, isn’t that wonderful? _ Eyes bright, full of joy, alive.

And I would kiss her back, and tell her, _That is wonderful, dear. Which one is Georgie? _And have her tell me all about it, for as long as she felt like, fresh cups of coffee in our hands and smiles in our lips.

But now she is dead. And they, too, will die— should die, without her. Because how could the world ever go on without her? Without her song and her warm loving fingertips; without her softness, which once cloaked the world in color and in light.

Out on the doorstep lies the black cat, unmoving. His eyes are closed, his tail curled around his frail cold form.

I’m hit with something— feeling, perhaps. Regret? No, I don’t regret. But as I stare at his crumpled form, I feel a sinking in my stomach, and my hands grow cold as ice. As I crouch before him, I see his chest ever so slightly rise, and then fall.

There is little time more. This cat will die, unless I feed it.

Losing control of myself, of the creature I’d been forced to become, my body carries to the kitchen. I set about taking the chicken from the fridge and chopping its flesh to small pieces.

I lay a saucer in front of the dark creature, and the smell stirs it from death.

In his eyes, now looking up to me again, I see hers— waking from deep slumber, and smiling once more.

[ Okay, I feel like maybe there’s issues with the pacing here. This is another story I might end up making a second draft of, which would probably be a little longer for better impact. Any advice on this is welcome! ]

Joy. Pure joy.

I'm not sure how long it's been since I've felt that. But I feel it now. And it's real.

I'm not sure how long I've stayed with Jasper. Maybe 2 years. Maybe 3. But that's all it took for him to do his damage on me.

I look at the sky and take a deep breath. I haven't taken a deep, cleansing breath in what feels like forever. I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally left that toxic life and I’m never going back.

I think of all the memories I have of Jasper. The posion he would pour into my ears and seperate me from everyone I’ve ever loved. What a waste of my breath when I would reason with him to cut the relationship.

What good was that? He would just gaslight me into staying with him. But him cheating on me for the 3rd time was really the last straw for me. And no amount of arguing was going to fix it.

It’s time for me to find myself again without the looming presence on Jasper. It’s time to be me again.

———————————————-

Thank you so much for reading my short story! It’s not my best work, but if you can leave me some feedback it would mean the world! Thank you again! <3

I‘ve been stuck in this desert since ages. Wandering around with no direction in mind. My water resources are slowly being drained. I‘m left with my thoughts with only the afternoon sun. The more I walk the more I feel how my thoughts turn into poison for myself. They make me feel worthless. The voices started to tune in. Screaming and begging me to give up. Has it always been so noisy inside my head? Did the sun fry my brain so it turned into this mess of racing thoughts and screaming voices? Suddenly a sandstorm starts appearing in the distance. Turning and twisting mercilessly towards me. Finally my mind goes blank. The poison of my thoughts numbed me with help of the upcoming danger. I‘m looking into the sky in hopes of finding something. I don’t even know what. I‘m just looking for something to save me. As the storm reaches me I feel calm. I accepted my fate. Nobody can survive this much longer. Not even I can. While I‘m speaking my final prayers I realize that the storm picked me up and started to carry me somewhere. But due to the lack of water i can see my vision getting blurry and then fainting. As i wake up my first thought is: God however saved me didn’t know it was a waste anyway. I‘m far past saving. The joy i used to bring and get is long gone. I‘m still haunted by my past actions. I‘m still running away from karma. But only god knows who the faster runner is. Only karma knows what tricks she hides. But will i be faster than my past and karma? Or will i drown in the waves of my past?

Poison clung to every life form around me, draining the joy from their eyes and replacing it with death. The sky thickened with smog, stinking the air around me. I’m unable to remember what it was like when I looked up and saw the beautiful shade of blue.

My grandfather clock gonged ten. Curfew began on Rosecourt Avenue, and no one in my dilapidated apartment complex dared to make a sound. While my nachos warmed in the microwave, I turned on my TV to watch old news. Most stories dated twenty years from now, before waste plagued the Earth, and everyone ignored the corporate greed running their lives. I did my best to avoid those, especially on Mondays.

I flipped though until I found something to lift my mood up. The news anchors gushed over a black cat who ran into a soccer field, kicking the ball with it’s tiny paws. A giggle left me. Everyone else in this complex wouldn’t be able to watch this with their new floating TVs that go wherever you want them to. They wouldn’t remember when anims existed, or when you searched things up with Google instead of the search engine in your brain. Everything from the past has been erased, as if the wealthy want to erase everything they ruined. Clean their slate so they can terrorize the world further.

The anchors moved on to a new update about Gene Lander. His fake tan marinated into a tropical orange color on his skin. His black hair receded from his head. Supposedly he began a nonprofit organization to support struggling patients with AIDS. Meanwhile, protestors bang at his door as his manufacturing company increases global warming.

I snatched my notebook from my couch and began writing everything down. For entertainment purposes, I began to investigate how things have escalated into what they are now. With the multiple repairs I have put into this TV, I haven’t gathered much. The only thing worth remembering is the name Gene Lander that always pops up. It’s mostly for praise, or for a commercial, but now is the first time I’ve heard anything bad about him. While supporting one cause, who knew he would be so careless with another?

Before they can go into any further details, the microwave goes off. I quickly get them out and take a bite.

Almost immediately I spit them out into the garbage.

They taste like decay.