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Weekend Writing Warrior 9/18/16 #8Sunday

Gunflint Lake on the MN/ON border

Gunflint Lake on the MN/ON border – the Boundary Waters start right across from it.

For September I’ll be pulling from several related short stories I wrote this summer, all dealing with the apocalypse.

Here’s what we have so far:

  • “Special” – a pair of twins with special abilities living in caves due to airstrikes
  • “The Graveyard” – a plague kills off most of a western mining town

This week it’s “E.L.E.” – a woman is out camping in the Minnesota Boundary Waters when disaster strikes. Like last week’s excerpt, this story was inspired by a trip through the setting this spring.

* * * * * * *

My dad used to say that extinction level events happened every 700,000 years or so, and we were more than overdo. Nonetheless, when an earthquake hit while I was out camping in the backcountry, I ignored it as anything more than routine seismic activity. Sure, earthquakes rarely hit northern Minnesota, but I’d come out here to relax, not to increase my anxiety by worrying about stuff I couldn’t do anything about.

The ash came a couple days later. Forest fires weren’t uncommon up here, and even though we were under a burn ban, this wouldn’t have been the first time someone’s campfire took out a few hundred acres. It was enough to send me back to civilization, though, because it wouldn’t be pretty when that blaze caught up to me.

I’d just stowed the last of my gear in my canoe and was preparing to shove off when a man strolled out of the forest. I tensed.

* * * * * * *

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Weekend Writing Warrior 9/11/16 #8Sunday

clown-motelFor September I’ll be pulling from several related short stories I wrote this summer, all dealing with the apocalypse.

Today’s story, tentatively called “The Graveyard,” was inspired by a town I passed through while wandering the country this summer: Tonopah, Nevada, home to the “haunted” Clown Motel located right next to an old graveyard filled with plague victims. Fun. :)

* * * * * * *

The plague hit quickly and deadly. In the course of just a couple weeks nearly half the town was dead, with those left alive torn between caring for the sick, burying the dead, or fleeing the county before they were struck down too.

With Pa taking the easy route and hightailing it out, and Ma dying right off, that left me the task of looking after the young’uns, and my older brother to bury the dead. Then the plague took him too, and most of the little’uns, until it was just me and baby Nylen after the plague was gone.

Pa had wanted a right proper homestead but there ain’t really any call for farming in the Nevada desert. He’d always talked about moving – west to California or north to Dakota Territory – but Ma’s people were here in Nye County and so she put her foot down. I thought about moving me and Nylen somewhere too, but where does a sixteen-year-old girl even go? So we stuck around, nearly the only folks still in town, determined to make the best of a bad situation.

* * * * * * *

Post a link to your eight sentences blog entry, or join the fun at the Weekend Writing Warriors website.

And if you’re a writer, sign up to be a Friday Five author, which gets you and your latest work featured on my blog.

Weekend Writing Warrior 9/4/16 #8Sunday

I’m switching gears and for September, I’ll be pulling from several related short stories I wrote this summer, all dealing with the apocalypse.

The first one, “Special,” is about a pair of twins, Niko and Tevi, and a unique ability Tevi has.

* * * * * * *

“Mishla,” our grandmother Yaya told Mother even before my brother and I were born, “the baby you carry is special, like my uncle Niko, the great general who fought so hard in the third war. You must name your baby after him.”

Mother had just learned Father had been killed in the fifth war, despite fighting so hard, and although she would’ve preferred to name my brother after him, she was too heartbroken to argue with Yaya.

Growing up, Niko didn’t do anything special. He played with the other children in the caverns into which we’d moved to shield us from the airstrikes. He matched their outlandish stories about their dead fathers’ exploits with ones about our own father, trumping them by including the adventures of his namesake, even though no one had heard of him.

One day, when we were about eight and Niko was running screaming with the others playing king of the hill, he pulled out the boldest story of all: “I have grass growing under my bed.”

Szymon paused from shoving him off our dirt pile hill. “No one has grass growing anywhere.”

* * * * * * *

Post a link to your eight sentences blog entry, or join the fun at the Weekend Writing Warriors website.

And if you’re a writer, sign up to be a Friday Five author, which gets you and your latest work featured on my blog.

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