Today’s three drabbles are ruminating on natural disasters and are a bit sad.
Also, if you have a fear of the ocean, the last one might be triggering.
We Were Safe
A breeze blows through the abandoned buildings, overgrown with encroaching trees and vegetation. A relic of time swallowed by nature. The wind tickles the branches, and scatters decades of dust through the broken streets. Where children played, laughed, and lives once blossomed.
Our secure, prosperous world.
Haunted now, by ghosts of oversight, lessons learned too late. Only empty structures and relinquished existence, a phantom place clinging to its previous state of being. The last casualty of disaster, the crumbling reminder of what was. Of what we lost.
Our happy world was safe.
We were safe.
Until the day we weren’t.
Waiting
A dimming sun, the colour of blood, fading in an ochre sky. Smoke billows as clouds, grey and thick, raining ashes to the ground. Bitter scent clings to the air, choking, reminding us of the monster lurking beyond the horizon.
Crackling, blazing, consuming.
While we wait.
In the night, a tangerine and crimson flare glistens ominously, a beacon of conflagration, a warning of our fragility. A living nightmare haunting sleep, and wakeful hours, as life moves forward, day by day.
The clock ticks, weeks to months.
Now the beast’s roar quiets. It is not gone, but contained.
So we wait.
Lost
Drowning where the land was dry, on a paradise beach, swept against the wall of sea. Carried down to the final void, sucking salt laden ocean into lungs made for air. Gasping, heaving, struggling upward, ever upward, but with no sense of direction.
Devoured, swept from your tropical perfection, engulfed.
A living being vanished.
Leaving behind the tears. Leaving a hollow space.
Where their laughter, their joy once existed.
Where a lingering ghost remains, a patchwork of memories and loss, of guilt and ache.
Thoughts of what might have been, and an empty chair.
Drowning in a sea of grief.
Be Afraid of the Dark 
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