This story is a product of 330 seconds of automatic writing.
The windows of the college were shrapnel, and a crater the size of trampoline lay where the front door had been. Walton Kearney may well have waited outside this former door for the bus home.
The building sat towards the center of the small redbrick town, near a boarded up factory that had pushed out canned food. Any remaining troops did not waste shoe leather on these streets.
She sloshed through the mucky water of the crater, and headed through the broken wall, and down a mouldy corridor. At the end of the passageway was a warped set of double doors. Once Thalia and Melpomene watched from above them. Only the sad face remained.
She had to use a crowbar on the door. The rusty lock snapped into jigsaw pieces, and she was in.
An audience of sagging chairs faced a rotting stage, a faded paint circle the only set design. A yellowed script lay within. She stepped into the circle, and picked up the crumbling pages. They smelt like musty treasure maps.
‘By Walton Kearney’ the title page declared.
The plot was a two hander between a man and a woman. Silly stuff. She read a few words aloud, and laughed. The jokes were strong and relatable. She continued with the female part, and allowed time for an imaginary partner to respond.
An intense pressure built in the air. Although holes dotted an already sagging roof, darkness folded down upon the theatre. One remaining spotlight of sunshine framed her on the stage.
The script took less than five minutes to perform. 'I love you' were the final words, a callback to a witty comment near the start. Upon completion the pressure in the air released with the force of a cannon ball mixed with a champagne cork. The bricks of the college dissolved into dust, and weeds rolled around her like a carpet unfurling.
When at last it was over, a forest replaced the shattered city. The skeletal remains of the sagging chairs watched her from the branches of a fir tree. Unknown birds called from above.
At last she understood how Walton Kearney had sped up the world. But she did not marvel. Instead she laughed at a joke on page two, and thought how much the protagonist was like her brother.
