Title: Box Of Old SIMcards
Word: longing
Challenger: Laurie Penny
Length: 200 words exactly
The memories were the worst.
Once a day, she travelled to a vault. She was shown into the vault, and the door was sealed behind her, leaving her alone to stare at the sole items of furniture: a wooden table and a plastic chair, the latter deliberately uncomfortable.
Then there was the box. One box, out of hundreds, chosen at random, or so she’d been told. Like so much, she’d come to doubt the truth of that, but who was she to judge truth or falsity any more? She sat at the table, opened the box and found the old fashioned mobile telephone resting upon so many chips of plastic. She would not be allowed to leave until she’d inserted 50 SIMcards into the telephone and read every text, seen every contact, checked every item.
The new bomb had been the ultimate deterrent: instant destruction of biological tissue, no damage to non-biological materials. A deterrent: never to be used.
And she’d ordered its deployment.
And now she paid for that action. Every day. Longing to be forced to remember, she was scared she’d forget and use it again.
The memories were the worst.
But then they were supposed to be.
© Lee Barnett, 2013
This is the tenth story in The Twenty-Four Hour Fast Fiction Challenge. There will be fourteen others… Sponsor me to complete them!
budgie's perch 