It wasn’t supposed to end like this. It was suppose to be a fairy tale, a ‘Happily Ever After’. It was suppose to be the two of us living in the suburbs, in a house with a white picket fence that our two point five kids played in. I would cook all day and bake him pies and cakes and cookies. He would work in the city and come home every night. I would meet him at the door, we would kiss. On the weekends he would play catch with our son while I taught our daughter how to take care of her man. We would be the modern day Cleaver’s and life would be perfect.
But someone had to get angry at someone else. Then their friends got involved, and then their friends, and the next thing you know, someone went and pushed the big red button and the whole world blew up. Literally.
Good-bye suburbs. Good-bye white picket fence. Good-bye two point five kids. Good-bye fairy tale. Good-bye ‘Happily Ever After’. Hello apocalypse.
I was one of the few lucky ones chosen to be shipped off-world in a Lifeboat. Each Lifeboat was designed to hold fifty people, and someone decided that sixteen year old kids stood the best chance to continue the human race, so other then the ten adults to run the Lifeboats, it was just a bunch of teenagers taken from their families, shoved into a tin can and launched into space.
Forty-eight Lifeboats were built. Thirty-five launched. We’ve lost two since then, one that never made it to orbit and the other just five years ago when their tether broke and it drifted away from the pack.
In case you weren’t doing the math, that is just over sixteen-hundred people who survived the devastation of an entire planet. We are the remnant of what’s left of that once great plant that held over 8 billion people. That was almost 12 years ago.
Today, I have a husband, and even though it started off as a requirement, we have come to care about each other. We live in a twenty by twenty habitat. He works maintenance on the water plant five decks down and I work two decks up in hydroponics. We have a daughter, the required single child we are allowed to have, and she turns 7 tomorrow. No, it’s not the happily ever after I dreamed of as a young girl, but last night… last night my husband painted a white picket fence on our door.
Filed under: Flash Fiction Tagged: MMWM
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