Story Telling

Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.

The prompts: This story must contain the words: thunder, plastic and disease

Story Telling

Shanna walked out into the night that was not a night.

Such a distinction was important, once upon a time. Day and night meant different things. The sun came out in the day and the stars at night. At least that’s the way the story went.

Such a thing was hard to imagine for someone that lived in the perpetual twilight of artificial lighting generated by a technology long forgotten.

There were lots of Once Upon a Time stories. Children learned them by heart while still young. The elders thought it was important that the lore of the past be retained. With no understanding of how their automated world worked, they resorted to the history keeping of their ancestors – story telling.

Tonight the story was about storms. Shannon hurried to the town hall; she was already late. Hopefully she would get there before they talked about Thunder. That was her favorite part. What a world it must have been to have water fall from the sky and booming sounds shake the walls.

Just before she entered the large meeting hall, Shanna paused to look past the buildings that housed the automated food producers; past the end of the street and the small grove of trees beyond. She looked at the boundary that both protected them from the disease of the world outside and, protected that same world from them.

That was one story she didn’t like to hear. The one that began with Once Upon a Time and ended with the remnants of mankind under a giant plastic dome designed to protect them from the world they had nearly killed.

She dreamed of the day, her children’s children would tell new stories. They would sit outside, under the sun and say, Once Upon a Time, we lived in a bubble.

Word count 300