Creative Challenge #4

The Prompt Is: Washed-Up

This short story is based on a single phrase, word, or sentence that serves as today’s writing prompt. The Creative Challenge is to write daily for 30 consecutive days. Each prompt was written by another creative (in this case, my partner) and is revealed on the day, precluding the opportunity for planning ahead. The purpose of this exercise is to be freely creative. Not all prompts will be posted.

Washed-up

The gravel was rough and cutting against his cheek. Not sand, it should be noted, but gravel: concrete, asphalt, brick, glass, and oxidized metal, broken down and eroded by the relentless sea over half a millennia.

There was a city here once. A harbor and an observatory high atop a hill. Skyscrapers and houses and roads—so many roads—and people. Throngs of people. Hordes of them. Now, there was a beach of gravel and there, atop an island, the once-proud observatory overrun by flora like the skull of a long-dead giant.

The buildings had fallen from the storms, and the people had left or died. The once bustling harbor was actually still standing, but it was several hundred meters below the water on the continental shelf.

Jack pulled his soaking wet body from the tides and the rocks with effort. A great sucking sound accompanied his shirt as he liberated it from the beach’s clutches, hoisting himself onto his hands and knees. Land-ho, he thought to himself, quoting a book he'd read as a boy. It was a classic about pirates—written nearly 500 years prior by a once-famed author—and he had read it so thoroughly as to have nearly committed it to memory.

That was many years ago now. Before the rioting had begun. Before the floating ark had become a war zone, and then inevitably, a graveyard.

Jack passed a stone monolith, the only standing man-made structure in sight, that jutted out of the ground like a broken tooth. A strange letter that looked like a lower-case letter “D” adorned it. The opposite side, under a curtain of thick bramble, read "City of Duarte".

He supposed that was as good a name as any for this new place. He struck out east, then north, from the beach he'd washed up on. Duarte Beach, he corrected himself.

Now, to find fresh water.