THIRD PLACE - SHORT STORY COMPETITION

 

Theresa Rajah won third place in the 2021 KREST annual short story competition.

Theresa is a 29-year-old journalist from Johannesburg, South Africa. She works as a features journalist for a mining and engineering publication. She is also a mom to an almost-two-year-old boy. Theresa lives in a small town called Springs in Gauteng.

Here is Theresa's third place-winning story:

I would never have thought this is how my time on earth would end.

My mind and body slowly begin working as one, pulling my consciousness out of subconsciousness. I am slowly being pulled, nudged even, out of sleep and into alertness. I feel it happening, and as I do every morning, I grasp onto the familiarities of my surroundings. My senses begin to feel around for reality as they move further away from my dream realm. I feel the slight crisp of the cold morning air, and sluggishly pull the duvet to cover my exposed shoulder. That movement, in a real space, speeds my other senses along. My ears are suddenly alert, listening for something familiar, or even something strange. I hear the low hum and buzz of electricity that fills my bedroom, making everything seem ever-so-subtly alive. Finally, my eyes build up enough confidence to flicker open. As my brain surfaces, it is met with slight confusion. Before I can even rationalise what’s happening, I am already annoyed because my room is still submerged in darkness. This can only mean that I have woken up well before I intended.

Groggy and still full of sleep, I reach my hand out from under the duvet and feel around for my phone. I turn it on to check the time and I am blinded by the bright light. The sudden onslaught of blazing white light on my newly awakened brain feels a lot like brain freeze. I blink away the sleep and try to register the time. Impossible, I think to myself. There is no way it’s 09:08 am and still this dark.

I sit straight up in the bed and begin taking a tally of everything going on around me. Something is off. Once again, the crisp chill in the air that I felt a few minutes ago brushes along my exposed arms and shoulders. I listen again and only hear the deafening silence that reverberates through my room. There should be the chipper and tweet of birds outside welcoming the day time. What was once annoying at 05:00 am on a weekday is suddenly strangely absent from my weekend morning. The rim around my bedroom curtain has the faintest glow from what seems like a dull light outside. On our hot December summer mornings, the world outside this bedroom is ablaze with glorious light, sounds and heat. But from where I sit now, this is nothing like our South African summer’s day.

I make my way to the curtain and yank it open, completely unaware and, quite frankly, a little bit nervous about what I might see. My jaw drops. This has to be a dream.

It literally happened over night. Everything outside is swept by sheets of snow in the middle of summer! No. Freaking. Way. Snowflakes are still powdering from the grey sky above and fine white fluffs slowly make their way down to the ground. New fluffs gently settle onto those that have descended before them.

The range of emotions that I speed through almost frightens me. The shock quickly turns into excitement and I run to my closet looking for my winter Uggs that have been long packed away. I settle for my regular slippers, throw on my thick winter gown that has found its home behind my bedroom door, grab my phone and house keys, and head for the door leading to my front yard. I don’t know what is going on, but I know I have to call my parents.

As I walk to the door, fingering my way through the keys with my phone securely lodged between my shoulder and ear, my ears are met with nothing but a dead tone.

That’s alright, I think to myself. I’ll try again in a few minutes and I absent-mindedly shove my phone into my gown pocket.

I unlock the door, excited about feeling the icy cold, soft snow between my fingers. I obviously have to build a snowman and take a photo for my Instagram timeline. While opening the door, my brain is trying to put together what could possibly be going on with the weather. It must be freezing outside for the snow to be standing in such high heaps and not melting. But while it is not the expected twenty-nine degrees and I do feel the crisp in the morning air, I definitely don’t feel cold enough to even be in this thick winter gown.  

I open the door and I am nearly knocked off my feet by the putrid smell that fills my nose. It is so severe and so pungent that it causes my eyes to water. The smell of fire, burning grass, ash, and what I can only assume to be the smell of melting flesh, creates an onslaught on my senses that is so severe, I can barely grab a hold of my thoughts.

What the heck is going on?

This is not the yuletide snowy fairy tale I thought was taking place literally on my doorstep. Quickly, I slam the door shut and take out my phone, trying my parents’ number again. Still, the call can’t be placed. Its only when I take a closer a look at my phone, that I see there is no network. Now I begin panicking.

I open the door again and cover my nose with the collar of my gown. I slowly make my way down the front porch steps, the snowy ash getting thicker and deeper with each step I take. It feels like foam, almost disintegrating to the touch. But the smell, oh, the smell. When my slipper-covered foot makes contact with the ground, my whole foot sinks into the soft white blanket. What would have been a comforting feeling is interrupted by the buzzing, tingling and slightly burning sensation I feel around my ankles where the ash makes contact with my skin.

Its resemblance to snow is uncanny, or at least, to my South African self who has barely seen snow up close. But it bears a stunning resemblance to what I’ve seen on television. However, the image of children playing outside in the snow, throwing snowballs at each other, building snowmen and catching the falling flakes on their tongue – no one would want to stick any part of their body voluntarily out to touch this stuff – is quickly distorted by the grotesque truck-like vehicle that pulls up at the end of my street.

I am finally made aware of the fact that my neighbours have come out to see this strange phenomenon too. The middle-age couple that lives next door, with scarfs tied around their noses and mouths, raise a nervous hand of greeting and acknowledgement of confusion. Mr Van Wyk steps out onto the street to take a better look at the truck at the end of the road.

He is the head of our community policing forum, so the rest of us have the confidence to step out onto the street as well after he slowly makes his way towards the truck. It is nothing like I have ever seen before. It is a dusty grey colour, with no windows. There are two cylindrical heads coming out the top of the truck with clear globes at the top. They remind me of crystal balls, but I am 100% sure that those balls don’t tell the future. The truck has no wheels and appears to almost be hovering a few centimetres above the ground. The creepiest thing about it, that I only notice until a few seconds later, is that it doesn’t cast a shadow on the ground.

As Mr Van Wyk approaches, the globes at the top of the cylinders begin rapidly rotating. In the dead silence of the street, the whirring of the globes seems relentless and blaring. He stops dead in his tracks. Suddenly, the cylinders move apart and the top of the truck opens. Out steps two humungous figures. They are covered head to toe in what appears to be high-tech armour. They look almost like stormtroopers, but the bright red colour of their armour creates a fear that almost entirely consumes me. No, don’t panic and don’t run. They might be the people equipped with handling the crisis at hand.

I squint my eyes slightly, almost completely forgetting that I had been fast asleep just a few minutes ago, and that’s when I see the glowing firearms in their hands. The tip of the firearm’s barrel glows bright hot and red. As they advance on Mr Van Wyk, I see the distortion in the air directly above the firearms, the air squiggling and trying to escape the heat. The two soldiers that have emerged from the truck have locked him in as their target, and I can feel the panic radiating off Auntie Sara, his wife, who is standing about five metres ahead of me to my left.

“Hey, what are you doing here? What’s going…” the words almost escape his lips. The soldier on the left fires his shot and obliterates Mr Van Wyk. His entire being blows up in a mushroom cloud of smoke, rising about three stories high, expanding, and gently raining down in the tiny puffs of snow that we have been seeing all around us. All too quickly, it all makes sense. The snowy ash falling all around us is all that remains of other humans.

An ear-shattering, high-pitched, gut-wrenching scream escapes Aunty Sara’s lips and the street is set into a frenzy. In seconds, the weapon is turned on her and a mushroom cloud stems to the sky from where she just stood. The same happens for my other neighbours, all of them being obliterated and utterly destroyed. I am frozen in my tracks. I can neither fight nor flight. All too quickly silence descends, and I realise it is because there is no one left to make a sound. I shut my eyes, blurred by the ash of those who, just seconds ago, stood around me. I hear their footsteps advancing on the stony tar.

When the footsteps stop right in front of me, I open my eyes and see the soldier mere centimetres away from me. Its looming figure stands almost double my height. I make an attempt to look around, unsure if it will cost me my existence, and I see that the only other person left standing is my opposite neighbour’s eight-year-old daughter, who is also frozen with fear.

We briefly make eye contact, and then, blackness.

I have no track of time or space, but when I wake up, I am in a dark room, barely able to open my eyes against the excruciating and pounding pain in my head. The only light comes from the screens on a wall in front of me. I try to make sense of what I’m seeing, and, after struggling to do anything beyond the headache, I see human faces on the screens, frozen with fear, standing still, shell shocked after what they have just witnessed. Then, they fall lifelessly to the floor. They are picked up and are brought into this room through a hole that opens above me. That’s when I realise I’m in a truck like the one I saw before.

I keep as still as possible, and then we are moving, floating or flying upwards. And as we are ascending, I catch a glimpse on the screen ahead of me – the Statue of Liberty.

I remember watching movies and laughing at how the end of the world or alien invasions only ever takes place in the US. And now here I am, a hostage on what I can only assume to be a UFO, watching first-hand how these beings capture and kill more people from our planet. An unknown fate awaits the few of us aboard this vessel. I don’t know where we’re going or why, all I know is it’s fear keeping me alive. 

CONGRATULATIONS, THERESA RAJAH! 

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