41/Flash Fiction: The Snail by Luke W. McCullough
Snail
And then the gates closed and the Snail was all alone.
There was a single moment when it first struck him that he was all alone, absolutely, completely, and totally all alone, forever. For just a second he tried to rock back and forth the way he used to when he was a child and the other kids would tease him and were so loud they scared him and it would all be too much. All that fear came back to him. He tried to move, and his body reacted, straining against the suit. But, he was ‘the Snail’, his body could not longer move in the suit, the suit moved for him.
Thinking about the suit was good, he remembered how much he loved the suit. Then the fear passed.
He had been the Snail now longer than he had been the scared little boy. He remembered he was all alone with all of his things, finally.
He always had to have his things with him, his books, his toys, HIS things. One boy, Everett Avery, stupid name, had called him ‘the Snail’ because of the giant bag he had worn in school. He didn’t have the suit then. But, even in his cruelty Everett had been right, the Snail was a good name for him. As he got older he had become obsessed with it, how could he carry everything he would need him at all times. He built his shell, a shell he could carry with him everywhere, and it only made it worse, everyone had wanted to talk to him. How had he done it, why had he done it, so many questions about him, about it.
Then the gates from nowhere to nowhere opened, and no one cared about the Snail anymore. But, the Snail had knew the gates were bad, he hid away. Gates to heaven they said, but angels scared the Snail. And he was right, these were not happy angels. When the angels were done carrying everyone off, or killing those who would not come, they left the Snail all alone.
After everyone was gone, and the batteries started to fail in the things around the Snail, it was the music the Snail stared to miss. He had never been able to make music, but he had loved music, he would listen to his mom’s old mp3s. He had not brought any with him, and he was going to miss music, and TV. He might, maybe, miss TV even more.
In the cold dark silence of his dead world, the Snail came to understand that less noise was what he wanted instead of an empty silence.
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