Flash Fiction

It isn’t going to be a good day.  One of those days when you gradually drift from the deepness of sleep into the luxury of a golden summer’s day.  When urgency is a footnote of no consequence.  It isn’t even going to be an average, routine day.

It is starting badly.  I am dragged with a disgusting abruptness from such a deep sleep to a state of instant screaming.  My mouth is working rapidly, and a piercing yodel, which I cannot hear, is comes out.  It takes a fraction of a second for me to realise why I can’t hear myself screaming.  The reason I can’t hear my screams is because there is an even louder sound drowning out my pathetic yodelling. And yet, for all my screaming, I haven’t, in the few brief seconds of wakefulness, moved, I can’t move.  My arms, and I assume my legs too, are pinned to the bed.  Whose bed is it? It isn’t my bed.  But I am the one trapped in it.  The even louder sound, which is clearly the rumble of falling rubble stops.  My screaming takes over.  I stop screaming as abruptly as I started.  Quiet falls around me echoing silently on the fallen masonry.  From my stone prison I stare the dust laden sky which used to be a ceiling.

There has been an explosion, and I am its victim.  I have never been a victim before.  I am not sure how I should react, hero or gibbering wreck.  I choose hero.  A hero awash, amidst a sea of stone.  I try to move.  I can move my head but nothing else responds.  I can feel no pain, no sharp or even dull responses.  I wait for pain and as I wait I try to remember, why I’m here, who am I.  Not the universal, unanswered questions, but the immediate, ‘who the hell am I’ question.