This is another one of Wendig's Flash Fiction thingies. The instructions are longer than the story:
This challenge is, as many of them are, both simple and complex, both easy and difficult.
I want you to write a story in five sentences.
No more than 100 words.
You can view it, if you’d like, as:
Sentence 1: Beginning / Inciting Incident
Sentence 2: Middle
Sentence 3: Middle peak, act turn or pivot
Sentence 4: Climactic turn or twist
Sentence 5: Resolution
That is not a strict map, but rather, a reminder that a story is a story, not a snapshot: it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
I'm pretty happy with how it worked it, even though I accidentally posted the unedited, 138-word version on his site. The first sentence makes me happy, but it sent me down a path that owes a debt to Arthur C. Clarke.
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When the apocalypse arrived, it did so in an unobtrusive, almost apologetic fashion.
For years, we carried on as though nothing had happened even though the future was slowly draining away.
It felt like we should be doing something but how do you confront something like the world coming to an end?
In the end, we didn't; we embraced it instead of going to war with it.
The end of the universe was just the end of who we were and all we needed to do was to let it go to become what we were always meant to be.
