The Red Heart Shaped Locket

The day the world ended I was in a cell under the ground. A cell stored with food and water, enough to last for a year. The world ended in every way I knew it could. It ended in the sense that there was no longer an endless supply of food which one could purchase with green paper. There was no longer clean water in the faucets. There was only death and suffering everywhere I looked. Scorched grounds without crops. Water polluted with dead fish, and dead carcasses everywhere there used to be animals and humans.

I had spent the year reading, eating canned foods, and crying a lot. Every time I looked at my metal shelf, I saw the heart shaped locket my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday. It was silver, encrusted with rubies. Inside was a picture of my parents. I carried it with me everywhere I went.

I first went down into the cell when I heard a storm was coming. I live in Arkansas where storms are common. I did not want to get blown away. My parents had left on a trip to Seattle to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and so were gone when I went into the storm shelter alone. Some massive explosion happened an hour after the storm ended and I decided to stay down in the shelter until my parents came back. My parents never returned.

When I realized from the calendar and the battery-operated wall clock that my parents would never return, I began to cry and realized the world had ended. So, I decided to wait a year hoping the world would not be toxic once I left my storm shelter. I gathered the courage to crawl out of the shelter once my food and water had been depleted. I put one foot on each rung of the ladder, and then remembered the heart shaped locket. I grabbed it from the metal rack and placed it around my neck and proceeded to climb out.

The grass was black all around, and the trees were burnt and bare. I realized my world had ended. So, I sat down on the black grass, and began to cry remembering my parents, my classmates, my friends, and my boyfriend. I remembered my first kiss with him when he took me to the high school homecoming dance. I remembered how we danced all night. I remembered how he discouraged me from smoking, because a lot of my friends were smokers and I wanted to fit in. I thought, it is all for nothing. Life is all for nothing, because it all ends, in smoke and ashes like a cigarette. I found myself wishing for a cigarette. I remembered how much I enjoyed lighting one up for the first time. I had lit it up in the meadow behind my house. I had felt the cold breeze on my face and the menthol smoke fill my lungs. When I told my boyfriend about it, he had threatened to break up with me unless I promised to never smoke again. At least I kept my promise to him, because the urge to smoke was not killing me, just the grief was.

After about an hour I got up and started walking, into the woods of bare trees to see if there were any other survivors. I walked and walked and found an old shed. I decided to walk in to see if anyone was alive inside. I found a woman there. She said, “hello. You survived?”

“Yes, I survived. Are there any other survivors?”

“Yes. A few. We are all gathering in the church for a town meeting in a few minutes. You should come. I think it is mandatory attendance for all survivors who know about it.”

“Thank you. I will be there.”

We walked to the church together. In the church I saw my boyfriend from before the tragedy. I ran to him and hugged him. He hugged me back, and then put his pointer on his lip to shush me. The town mayor began to speak.

“As survivors are coming forward, because they have run out of food in their storm shelters, we need to focus on how we are going to survive. Our supply of food is gone, the animals are dead, and crops are not growing. So, we have to find food. Any suggestions?”

The crowd was silent. Then a boy said, “I guess we will have to eat each other.” Everyone gasped.

The mayor then said, “Tommy is right. If we do not find a source of food, we will all perish.”

My boyfriend then said, “Won’t we eventually run out of human flesh too, and eating each other is wrong. I would rather starve to death.”

The mayor replied, “We will take a vote, on what to do.”

The town voted to starve to death.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A few days later we had water, that we dug from a makeshift well, but the soil seemed to be infected with something that would not let anything grow. So, we decided to kill old man Henry’s pet dog. They shot him in the head, cut off pieces of his meat and roasted it on a fire. There was enough to feed everyone. Old man Henry refused to take part in the massacre of his dog, and soon after had a heart attack.

We packed water, and supplies, and got on a bus and travelled for about a month. After a while we got to the border of Canada.

At the border of Canada there were Arabic soldiers, who immediately pointed guns at the us. They said, “get out,” stripped, searched us, and arrested us. They said, “we will have to see if there is radiation on you, from the bomb that we threw on America. We will dominate the world with fear. For we killed America so the rest of the world will bow before us. We have placed explosives at undisclosed locations throughout the world, so we own the world. Praise be our King and God.”

One soldier saw the heart shaped locket hanging around my neck and he grabbed it and tore it off. He then through it on the pile of clothes. I screamed as he tore it off. I desperately wanted my locket back for it was all I had of my parents. As I stood there, looking at the locket, I wondered what would happen if I reached for my locket. I realized they would probably shoot me in the head. As I realized my own mortality, I thought, ‘would not dying as I reached for the memory of my parents be better than a life of slavery to Al Qaeda? Would not joining them be preferable? For whatever death may bring, either a dark abyss or a heavenly bliss, it would be better than slavery.’