The Last Rose Garden

The first missile launched into a blue spring sky like a child’s toy reaching up, up, up only to come back down thousands of miles away. It fell in California, and the US retaliated quickly sending three missiles back in the direction from whence it came. Russia was next, firing towards the US first, and following some bad information they'd received weeks prior, going after Japan. Within hours the rest of the world was joining in with whatever arsenal they had, paying no mind to the destruction and havoc being wreaked all around.

England was the first to run out of missiles, and the third to fall. As the other powerful nations crumbled alongside them, a hush stole over the earth.

By early May not even the flowers had the courage to bloom. The Earth had been destroyed. The few people that had survived lived on lonely mountaintops, or already desolate villages far away from the fighting and strife the rest of the world had engaged in. But even they suffered as the air slowly turned to poisonous smog, threatening to suffocate all who dared remain. The earth was slowly choking her final inhabitants to death, like a dying man crushing the head of the snake that bit him. Fields and farms had been desolated, the same as monuments and government buildings. The world was quiet. It would have been serene if not for the disaster stretching from one end of the globe to the other. Even the birds had fallen silent, or fallen dead, their beautiful songs frozen in throats that would never draw breath again.

Homes turned to ash, buildings marred the earth like gravestones for an endless cemetery, and rivers ran black with ash and debris. Skeletons reached their pleading hands to the sky, looking for a salvation that would never come as cracked and shriveled trees gazed down on the deceased and decaying, lone sentinels guarding the forgotten dead.

Save for one small patch of earth. At the end of the world grew the last rose in the last flower garden on the planet. The brave, or perhaps foolhardy, rose had first begun peaking out at the world mere minutes after the war had begun. A small green sprout, popping up from a war cracked ground with the all the grace of a dancer rising from a stage. The only living creature nearby was a tawny barn owl, small for its kind, but nearly as resilient as the rose. The owl had first noticed the rose while on one of many fruitless hunts through the war-scarred land. At first the owl had passed by, assuming the foolish green bud would be dead by morning. But as the rose grew, the owl took more and more interest in it. Sometimes merely passing by overhead, checking the progress of the silly sprout, and other times stopping for hours at a time to watch the red petals as they slowly folded out from the thick green stem.

Now it stood lonely and prim staring out over the desolate world around it, with no one left to care for it but the sage and curious owl. The velvety crimson petals unfolded into the pale half-light of dawn as though asking why it of all creatures should refrain from flaunting its resiliency, and the owl seemed to agree, as it continued to admire the lone beauty.

The coarse green leaves poked haughtily up towards the sky, with a smug beauty; proud to be the only queen in the patch of earth it called home. It spiraled steadily up, moving as though in a slow and intricate dance, occasionally taking a small bow for its one audience member before resuming this final death waltz.

The owl greeted the rose day after day, sometimes screeching into an empty starlit sky as though congratulating a well made performance, other times watching with a reverent silence. The rose performed with all the arrogance of a renowned ballerina, as the rest of the world died all around, until even the owl failed to arrive for the nightly performance. As though waving goodbye to its lone admirer, the last rose in the last garden on earth, swayed gently under a dying sun.