Short Story: The Tyrannical Ball Of Fire

Ferociously, the wind tears at the great dunes with its vicissitudinous talons, raising beige apparitions from the earth. A tyrannical ball of fire rises from beyond the horizon and the thin, misty clouds, melting away the last vestiges of the darkness from before and showering its radiant blankets upon everything underneath. From below the uppermost layer of sand pokes the skeleton of a dead thing, long sapped of its life force, doomed to remain an eerie relic of what once was.

Across the golden hills teeters a person, who desperately tries to shield his flushed, rheumy eyes from the fiery winds that claw at his face. He is barefoot, and his clothes are but shreds from a ruined tapestry.

He is alone. There were three at first, but two had already been seized by the great waste’s unseen maw as offerings to some gross, everlastingly ravenous stomach.
This man is no different; his two companions had fallen prey to the torridity, so why not him? It’s only a matter of time before he, too, becomes a part of the banquet.

He is fleeing from his home. All his life, he had lived back there in blissful ignorance of the adult matters wracking the outside world. Day after day, it was a trip to school and back, and then another trip to school and back again, ad infinitum.

Then they came to power. From the comfortable adequacy of his home, he watches as a man in a white shirt stands on the podium, screaming intense words of political fury and shaking his fists in defiance of the heavens. His volatile, resolute rhetoric is met with cheers of adulation from the faceless people below, cheers that continue even as he takes his seat and a second man in a white shirt assumes the first’s