Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 133

This painting was done by William Michael Harnett, an Irish/American painter in 1877 and is titled:  'Still Life Writing Table.' It's owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

As a writer it appealed to me, and I tried to do something different with it. 

The General Guidelines can be found here.

How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here.

There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.

Dystopia

Dear Georgie,

Hello. Yes, I’m still here, it’s just my hands aren’t doing as well as they were and that’s difficult now with us all being reduced to handwritten letters. I’d never imagined we would go back to using ink and feathers, like in medieval times, and my hands are struggling with it at my age. Who ever thought we could run out of biros, and pencils? Looking back we had such strange ideas of what dystopia would be like, always viewing it from the idea of wars, and violence, and anarchy, only missing food or power. We totally overlooked the simple things, like pens or pencils, or certain sanitary products.

I miss transport. Yes, we have horses, but the idea of having to stay within the country or even county and never being about to go overseas on holiday again is a strange one. I know I should be used to it by now, several decades on, but I’m not.

What happened to the idea we could put it all back together and carry on? Why aren’t we able to? I can see the youth already not caring or being interested in what we had before. They make it out to be such an evil time, full of evil products that damaged the earth, but they have no idea the convenience they would bring, especially simple things like pens. But then there is the whole push back against learning and education and being literate, it’s worrying. It’s like an uprise of a whole new religion and I thought we were finally done with all that, silly beliefs based around some kind of Chinese whispers. Do you remember those, Georgie? We used to play them all the time when we were young.

The only thing the youth have achieved since the Final Days is eradicate power and corruption. Finally gone are all those god awful politicians and wars, and people trying to control other people – and of course the thing that drove them all – money. Community has become key. I love that. I never imagined that would ever happen. It’s like something out of Star Trek – do you remember that show? Gosh I miss television sometimes, and even the concept of travel into space has also been eradicated, none of them are interested in that anymore. Madison said to me the other day, when he came over with his family, ‘Dad, we’re not interested in that anymore, we’re only interested in loving and thriving and being here for each other. That’s what the world’s about now, and a good thing too.’

I have to say, Georgie, I couldn’t argue with that one. It’s like the dream that was endlessly proffered to us all, of world peace, has arrived. Yes, it’s not quite as we imagined, with the last of humanity living in small clusters with only the basics, but I don’t miss the noise of the world at all. And it got so much worse after with the advent of the Internet and mobile phones, and then that awful creation, social media. I sometimes wonder how different it would have been if no one had ever developed that. The world population might still be here, and we’d still have so many luxury items – even pens! And I wouldn’t be handwriting this to you with this scratchy piece of bird feather. I’d be typing instead – gosh how I miss the simplicity of pressing keys to get something.

And on that note, I’ll sign off. My hands get so tired these days. I can’t do the ten or eleven page missives I used to.

I’ll definitely make a trip to you next month, hopefully this will reach you by before then.

Take care until then.

Love Mastin xx