"top of the world" ~ a five-minute #freewrite

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Green, yellow, and purple squares sat beside one another, separated by a thin black line adorned with tiny coloured dots that raced along its path, each vying to get to its destination before the one behind it.

At least, that's what she imagined.

Chloe moistened her lips and peered through the fog, then clamped her eyes shut. The white wisps had faded to reveal brown and dying squares where the colours once had been — the farmland, unattended for several years now and left to rot in ruin. Here she was, on top of the world at last, and the one thing she had wanted to see more than anything else was as gone as everything else.

A younger and more joyful Chloe had dreamed of hiking through the wild paths of this mountain, camera in hand, bag on her back, burbling with the excitement at the prospect of the paragliding site that awaited at the top.

Well, she still had a bag on her back at least. This was not the hiker's backpack she had dreamed of, though. No, the pack she now wore held what little remained of her life. The ruins of her life. She never would have dreamed of carrying the barely edible remains of a skinned rat, either.

She shuffled the bag across her shoulders and arched her back to steady the load, then froze as a low, rasping growl echoed across the way. She sucked in a sharp breath and held it, listening for the tell-tale whistle that would accompany such a growl if the creature were hunting nearby. The whistle did not come.

She was lucky she had even made it this far without being eaten alive by one of the beasts that had mutated during the fall, or by the men and women who dared hunt such beasts. She was lucky she had even made it at all...

 

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Hello! It's my first #freewrite in a while. 🙂 But I really felt like writing something today, so I ran to @mariannewest's profile and picked up the prompt (for yesterday, since today's isn't up) and did what I could. The prompt is: "top of the world".

What I've posted is what I wrote after tidying up the original 5 minute work.

If you'd like to see the original before the tidy-up, here you go:

You can find the prompt behind these blue words!

 

Thanks for stopping by! 😊📚

 

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