Bang Goes the Prompt

With a mere week to go before Christmas, I find myself sunk into a lethargic haze, incapable of any kind of higher creative or rational faculties. With this in mind, I'm going to spend the next little while posting a few short pieces that I've written in the last few months in response to writing prompts. All were written in fairly short order; between 15 and 30 minutes for the most part, and I haven't edited much in transcribing. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

For this first piece, the prompt was simply to write about an explosion. After pondering and rejecting the idea of writing about a population explosion, this is what leaked out of my brain.

With hindsight, the mountain was doomed from the moment we decided to store all the TNT together in the same cavernous warehouse, especially given the frankly ludicrous amount of it we had. I think someone misplaced a decimal place on the order form. OK, OK, I’m not trying to evade responsibility. I understand now that I should really have fixed the slanting shelf before I stacked up all those vials of nitroglycerine on it. What can I say? It was the end of the day, I was tired, I thought, “It’ll still be here in the morning, right?”

Wrong.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a large geographical feature explode. I recommend it, if you can find a safe distance. If there is a safe distance. Thousands of tons of rock and soil were not meant to fly, which makes it all the more impressive when they do. Though I do feel sorry for the flock of sparrows which was completely obliterated by a particularly large fragment of mountain sailing through the air. I found myself applauding, as if it was all a carefully organised show, even as pebbles rained down around me. Moments later, as an uprooted tree sailed past me, I decided it was probably time to turn and run. Pity, really. That meant I never saw the second tree coming straight for me.

So here I stand, or float, with nothing to do but take account of my life and all the ways I went wrong. But it wasn’t entirely my fault. Was it?