A version of this post originally appeared in the online lit magazine Voidspace in December 2022, as part of a writing prompt challenge, "pick a word," to create an opening creative flash fiction piece based on a randomly chosen word and its opposite. The rules were: start the piece with the word, end the piece on the antonym. Try to write from a new perspective (ie, 3rd person instead of 1st). In the second part, kill off your main character. Repeat the exercise with a new word. To read this in the original unedited version, visit here.
Beets are humble, you think, as you harvest the last bulb from the noxious mulch, your hands already stained purple. So different from the other strange fruits and vegetables you grow in section 28C of Earth’s replacement home. Next to you, Xana plucks her crop from the end of the green basin: a single, fluorescent blueberry.
“Syllabus,” you hear, and then the cracking of static. Her mouth is moving behind her mask – you realize she has been talking for awhile. Xana makes a motion with her hands to signal that your artificial hearing has crapped out again. You sign “sorry” but you’re not – not really – you turned it off on purpose and it doesn’t always shut down properly. You don’t like all the noise. It’s too much chaos.
BOOM. The explosion knocks everyone down, and immediately kills Derzol and Flora. Xana sees it happen as though in slow motion – Derzol, still holding the beet, his hands purple, miming sorry even though she knows he turned off his hearing device on purpose. When this happens all she can think is that she wishes she had turned off her Implanted Vision Device, because she will never forget the scene. “At least it wasn’t in color,” she thinks, although she doesn’t know what color looks like and so can’t comprehend exactly how it would be worse. It’s quiet after the blast, almost a feeling – the epitome of the word silence.
Beets are humble, Derzol thinks, as he plucks the red bulb from the posion soil. He has the strangest sensation that he has been here before, but the thought is quickly wiped from his mind when he sees that Xana has harvested something unusual from her basin: a single, fluorescent blueberry.
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