Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 79

This week's prompt picture is again all over the net and various pinterest accounts globally. A lot comes up in Arabic so it could be from someone in the Middle East, but sadly can't be tracked.

In an attempt for originality I tried to encompass different ideas of what a castaway situation might be caused by. I liked where it ended up. 

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Portent

She crawled out onto the beach, having spotted something from the safety of her dark hole. She winced a little in the glare of the rising sun, the first she had seen for a long time – maybe even a year - thanks to the monsoon. At least that’s what she called it. She’d wondered if the constant storms and torrential rain would ever stop or whether that would be it, now until the end of time. She’d survived on the scrapings she’d found in the hole, of left over dead things and insects, plus the leaves from a bush at the entrance; it had remained green throughout the onslaught of weather.

The colour of the item had been enough to bring her out, to pull her emaciated frame over the pebbles down to the shoreline. It was there, resting on a flat stone, bright and friendly, and very pink: a flower head. She wondered how the petals would taste. But when she touched it, she found they were material. It was a fake flower. It explained how it had survived the storms.

She picked it up and fondled it, enjoying the view of something different; a remnant from a time past that had travelled on the waves to reach her remote location. She wondered that there weren’t more objects. What had happened to all the things that people once had? All the objects they coveted and kept around them to feel some sense of ... what? Belonging? Completeness? Existence? Didn’t they all end up in the sea? Isn’t that were all humanities rubbish ended up?

She supposed that maybe they had been swallowed up by all the eruptions and fissures in the earth. Burnt up rather than washed away; incineration cleansing the earth more deeply than mere washing.

Some would say she’d been lucky to survive, but she wasn’t so sure. Her luck had only been in her decision to take a trip in a one man boat, to brave the seas of the southern oceans. Her motives were less than pure with the hope of attention and sponsorship and an income that would provide her with a lifestyle she wanted. But even before she climbed into her little sail boat she had known that the world was undertaking a rapid change, one where the human race risked extinction. It had been the reason she had brought her departure date forward, and stocked her little boat more heavily with supplies.

She hoped for survival and she had been granted that, all be it as a shipwreck victim, or a castaway. But there would be no chance of rescue for her. She didn’t plan any escape. She knew there was nothing left to go back to. She’d heard the end of it all on her little radio before the storms had capsized her. The only hope she had now was that with the return of the sun she could continue her survival, and she chose to believe that the arrival of the flower was an indicator of that – a portent.