20/11/2022 - A Women’s Job
Reading time: 3 min
Photo Courtesy of Alessandro Laurucci
They used all the chairs in the village to prepare for the attack. Wooden or plastic, crooked, with a leg missing or solid, stools and even wheelchairs when they fell short. They’d placed them in a wide circle, regularly spaced, embracing the people who could not fight.
From five of the chairs, at equal distances from each other along the circumference, two lines of sand had been laid, going straight between the buildings and meeting in five points, so that, from the sky, the formation looked like an encircled star.
Men couldn’t fight men in this war.
Men were just boys playing with weapons. Useless in defending a village such as Stormrear, they stayed back with the elderly and the children, trembling, powerless in their houses.
Women had to step up.
They wore white. Long dresses with long sleeves, barefooted and with their hair free to fly in the wind. They did this while soldiers approached the village from the woods in flak jackets and boots, brandishing guns, protected by tanks and planes and drones.
The women walked the fields to the chairs and sat, waiting.
The sun was blossoming above the horizon, but as it grew shinier, its colour gloomed and twisted towards bloody shades, and the whole landscape turned red with it, making the women’s dresses look like they were drenched in blood.
Before the army, its artificial smell reached the village like an aura of evil, rich with iron and burnt gunpowder, and when soldiers appeared between the trees, their deadly vehicles overflowing the dirt road, they saw the world through a curtain of blood.
As they drew closer, the very air they breathed became thicker, its consistency as dense as mud, and the mere act of walking towards the women fatigued them, increasing their temperature above suffering. Sweat impeded their vision. Heaviness burdened their lungs.
Another few steps and their weapons became too hot to be held. Helmets scalded the soldiers’ foreheads like frying pans. The tyres of their cars popped. Tanks liquified, trapping the drivers inside in a burning hell.
The women had only opened their arms, fingertips barely touching with the next in line. With their hair floating as if in water, they hummed a low litany, and when the first soldiers fell to the heat, they increased their volume. Then again. Then again. Then again. Finally, even the noise of the planes and of the engines exploding couldn’t be heard over the hum.
The army melted like snow in spring, and where metal and flesh touched the ground, red flowers appeared, enveloping the fields outside Stormrear in a protective embrace.
The war ended with the enemy’s demise, and the legendary resistance of the small village of Stormrear travelled the nation.
The president himself lined the men in a touching ceremony and gave them medals, while the children, the elderly, and especially the women watched.
As the medals touched the villagers’ breasts though, they heated just enough to be uncomfortable, admonishing those undeserving men, reminding them to keep their mouths shut, and under the enthusiastic words of the president praising them profusely, a gentle hum was carried away by the breeze.
About this story
Prompt: Visual prompt here.
Notes on the challenge
Each and every story published here has been written, reviewed, polished and published in less than 90 minutes. Which means you’re going to find spelling mistakes, ugly sentences and weird structures. I still hope you’ll enjoy them!
