Iain James Read

Crater Charlie's Magpies

Magpies were the lifeblood of Crater Charlie. They flew in from afar or crawled across the tangled carpet of unchecked plant-life, and they descended on the suspiciously perfect circle of Charlie’s crater; the one for which he was named, in case there was any doubt about that. Creative nomenclature had been one of the first casualties of the apocalypse, much to everyone’s surprise. Admittedly it did have to wait in line behind the enormous loss of human life, the devastation of various major settlements, and the utter collapse of global society as it had been known for hundreds of years, but those ones were so expected that they barely warranted a mention. It was the loss of nuanced naming conventions that really hit the survivors hard, because they were going to have to live with the consequences forever and it really wasn’t clear why it’d happened in the first place.