June 22nd is International Flash Fiction day. In celebration, there is a contest going on, encouraging authors across all genres to write a work of Flash Fiction (300 words or less).

Clocking in at 299 words, I present my entry into this year’s contest.

Stars

The night was a blanket of stars, the darkness absolute and the silence broken only by the last serenade of crickets and the distant, unending siren’s wail. The nearby base was calling troops to arms, but it would take a Howitzer General aimed at my head to move me off the hood of my nineteen-sixty-nine Plymouth Roadrunner, or perhaps the end of the world. No, not even then. My cherry-red baby and I were going to see this thing through to the very end.

The sirens grew louder and I cursed at them for wrecking the little piece of off-base heaven I’d found. What were they possibly hoping to accomplish? Might as well be throwing stones at an asteroid. I laughed. Well, technically speaking, it was a planet. A Goddamned planet that our country’s media denied the existence of until the very last second. ‘To avoid mass hysteria’, I was told. When the announcement did go public, and the biggest load of shit did indeed hit the proverbial fan, I had to wonder if we really avoided anything at all, aside from taking away those extra precious days for people to hold one another and say goodbye.

No, there was no avoiding this. It was what it was, and I planned to lay out here until it was no more.

The intrusion of headlights into my solitude and two car doors closing elicited another curse.

“Madam President,” the deep baritone in a tight military accent interrupted the crickets as they reached their stanza. “It’s time for us to head below.”

Below. The bunker. The tomb. Built decades ago under another president’s nose. Plausible deniability my ass.

“They need you, ma’am.”

A deep inhale and a wide-eyed stare gave me the last taste of the stars I would ever know.