The war of wars - short story

Our people are of the foraging kind. We live off of the land, collecting plants and crops to live.

We count ourselves extremely lucky. Our landscape is prosperous and abundantly filled with vegetation growing so high it scrapes the heavens. During the warm seasons, one plant bares numerous flavoursome fruits, so big that one alone is enough to feed a whole family for months. The enormous vegetation provides refuge and shelter for us all. We’re constantly protected from the extreme weather and heavy rain. Everyone has their own space; everyone has a home.

It’s a good life.

We’re a very peaceful population. Very docile. We don’t preoccupy ourselves with big worldly questions like the meaning of life or its purpose. We simply enjoy what the earth has given us while we can. We want for nothing. Everything we need is provided by mother nature

Only one thing discomforts us – the war.

The war with ‘the other kind’ had been going on for centuries – I couldn’t even tell you why it started, seems that no one remembers.

We call them ‘the other kind’ simply because we have no other way of describing them. They don’t look anything like us. Their bodies are huge and graceless. They’re so long and awkward that gravity seems to affect them much more than it does us. It seems to control them more. They are prisoners to it - they’re always falling and tripping over everything.

But they’re fast. Very fast. Lightning fast in fact. That’s how they get us – with their speed.

I don’t know how the war began; all I know is that we can’t have been the cause of it. We’re not fighters, we don’t try to eliminate them as they do us.

When this war first started, we chose flight – and there’s no way we can change that now. Hiding from them has been embedded into our psyche.

This is the way that it’s always been, they attack, steal our food, kill our families – and we hide. It’s just the way it is. In the last couple of years, it seems we have become quite good at it. Damage and deaths seem to be diminishing and the fear that constantly overtakes our lives seems to be slightly less.

However, lately, a strange virus has started killing off a lot of our population. Some conspiracists suspected it to be the others poisoning us in some way. But I don’t see how it could be. There were just too many facts pointing to them being innocent on this account.

Anyway, why would they start to poison us in the first place? It’s not like they’re losing this war and need an immediate solution to irradicate us.

Nevertheless, the virus is deadly – it wipes out entire families within weeks. It seems as if the infected individual is physically unable to eat and slowly starves to death. A painful and cruel way to go if you ask me.

Well, turns out I’ve got it.

To be aware that you’re starving to death, to feel the intense pain of not eating and still not being able to is absolutely horrifying.

I’ve spent the last few weeks sitting alone, afraid it may be contagious and not wanting to be a burden to anyone.

The only thing giving me any sort of relief is the hope that I’ll be reunited with my two siblings when I do leave this world.

As I feel myself taking my last breath, I slowly distance myself from everyone so that I may die alone. As I’m sitting, looking up at the sky, I see one – one of them. They’ve always been hideous to me – horrible, dry, pale thick sheath covering the entirety of their lanky frame; some kind of thick, coarse, grass-like fibre protruding from the top of their heads. As I look at it, it begins to come closer – it’s the first time that I’ve seen one so near to me. It’s only now that I realise how immensely huge it really is. It was holding a container. It races closer holding a monstrous house sized rectangular object in its bony claws.

My last breath was spent reading aloud what the words said on the side of this thing. I had finally discovered the truth behind the virus.

Snail poison.

Written by Lily Dale, 29/11/2022

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Hope you enjoyed my new story. Let me know what you think :)

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