I want to thank everyone who has submitted to our flash fiction competitions! I love reading through the submissions and seeing the widely different takes on the prompt. This week I was intrigued b…
Source: Flash Friday Winner
I want to thank everyone who has submitted to our flash fiction competitions! I love reading through the submissions and seeing the widely different takes on the prompt. This week I was intrigued b…
Source: Flash Friday Winner
Wow! That was a great story. I want to read more. Mine is below:
Anticipating Validation
She had waited her whole life for this day. Watching the skies, listening to the cosmos, and waiting for a sign. Today would be the day. A day of reckoning. A day to savour. She would be proven right, to all the doubters. They would finally see what she had known all along.
We are not alone.
They were coming here. Today. This is it.
The sky is very dark. The mood is a quiet anticipation. She has been listening her whole life for that one sound, the one that was not random, but a reply to her signal. Last week, she finally heard it. A definite response. What it meant, she could only guess. But there it was.
It got closer and louder. She was able to watch the progress when she isolated the origin of the response. When she had an image to follow on her Milky Way map, she was able to outline the progress through space and get a rough idea as to when they would be here.
Her friends gave up trying to reach her when they decided this was more than a passing fad. They called it an unhealthy obsession. They would learn the truth with the whole world, at the same time she got her validation from out there beyond the stars.
Someone else out there was listening for her in space. They had heard her message, and were coming to visit. She spent a lot of time wondering what they would look like. Aliens from the imagination can be anything, and the little green men from Mars were not what she wanted to see. She wondered what they would be like, if they would be friendly or not, but she just knew she was going to be the first one to greet them, for the first human and alien meeting. No matter what happened after that, her mission in life would be validated.
There was a storm rolling in. She knew it was a sign that they were close. She was ready. As she walked out of her house into the field, she looked up to the heavens, and took it all in. She opened her arms in welcome to the sky, and saw flashes of while light streaking towards the Earth. Millions of them, like shooting stars, plummeting to the surface of the planet.
When they stopped, she noticed that they were assembling into small groups. They began connecting together, before her eyes. It was like pieces of a puzzle, clicking into place. A solid shape from one of the groups approached her. As it got closer, she started hyperventilating.
The next thing she remembered was seeing a clear blue cloudless sky. And the knowledge that they were gone. And with them, the proof she needed to be right about them. She felt alone in the world, and very empty inside. She stayed on the ground where she woke up, and cried.