Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Posts

Here are three short scenes I wrote between Christmas and New Year – they might be part of the Circle of Fifths story, they might not…

One: A Conversation

“Of course, you know everything fails, eventually. In time this Circle will fail. Like all the others. It must. It will.”

“They will try though, won’t they?”

“Oh yes, yes, they will try! They will expend a great deal of energy but they will falter.

“What happens then?”

“They can embrace the other or they can fall into darkness.”

“They still get to choose?”

“Yes, my child! Everything in the universe gets to choose, even to the very last. There is always a choice. The universe is filled with choices. What most beings don’t understand is that the universe is also filled with consequences. Point and counterpoint. The five are fallible and ultimately, they will be unable to sustain the universal orchestras. The music will cease and this will all fall back into nothing.

Then, for a perfect moment, before it all begins anew, we will have beautiful, uninterrupted silence.”

The turkeys had all died.

I mean all of them, across the entire world, they ALL died. Taken by a particularly virulent variant of bird flu, which also took chaffinches and parakeets and a host of other species with it¹. This was made sadder and even more depressing by the fact that the very last turkey in the world, Sven, died on Christmas Eve that year. A fact that devastated much of western culture and dominated the Christmas news feeds, but failed to really register in other parts of the world, especially during the brutal monsoon season of that year which had barrelled in after the worst droughts in living memory.

            Vegans didn’t really give a fuck.

With a sigh, Julie put down her shopping bags. In all her years she couldn’t remember seeing weather like it. An old newspaper streaked past and whacked into the side of a rubbish bin, pinned against the dirty metal for a moment before being pulled down the street. Julie turned to the elderly woman stood next to her. With a nod to the wildness on the street she said, “Have you ever seen the like?”