Worthing Flash

Dear Diary, This is so embarrazzing. I don't know what I was thinking. Okay, that's not true. I do know what I was thinking. I wanted to get away from them. My parents. They're constantly bickering about petty shit and even now, when we're here in this perfectly picturesque place, they can't stop for five minutes. I tried to go to my room, shut them out but their voices are too loud and this Airbnb is too small. So I got into my dad's stash of weed brownies and ate a whole one. I thought it'd make me too high to pay attention. Boy was I wrong. Instead of floating me off to cloud nine like I'd seen it do in the movies, it just enhanced everything; sight, sound, hearing, fears, anxieties, insecurities...I felt like I was drowning in every thought I'd ever had. I had to get out. So I climbed out of the window and ran. Yeah I know, we're in the middle of a damned National Park, there are animals and shit, and I ran out into the wilderness at dusk.   ...

A story by Annemarie Musawale Chapter One: Apocalypse Now Paula Domitia wiggled her way from under the pile of rocks she’d been hiding under shielding the baby in the groove of her abdomen. It had been almost a week since she’d seen the light and she didn’t know what was waiting out there. She’d kept an ear out, listening for the things. The things that used to be her neighbors, her family, her friends. Now they were just…mouths and hands and destruction. They would eat anything; concrete, steel, brick, flesh, bone or blood. The comic books had gotten it all wrong. Zombies didn’t eat brains. Or maybe these weren’t zombies. Maybe they were just horrible mutations brought about by radiation, global warming and adaptation to the befouled air. It had started so slowly, so insidiously that hardly anyone noticed. CNN first called it a new craze; people craving stones to eat. There was precedent after all. Pregnant women were known to eat stones now and then. For...