This story was originally published in the Promptly Written publication on Medium by yours truly, in response to the prompt 'Either dream or reality' from editor Ravyne Hawke.
Crystal Clarity
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| Image by meineresterampe from Pixabay |
It seemed so fantastical. A miracle of modern craftsmanship and engineering, they called it. He hated it.
Layers of quartz and glass melded into one another to create this sturdy viewing platform, over the crater. It didn’t seem real. And yet… it was strong beneath him. Physical.
He wouldn’t look down, through the surface, the prism, the light. Instead he looked across at the crater itself, ragged, raw, a bleeding wound on the landscape.
They told him the platform was very beautiful — stark contrast, they said, with the catastrophe it looked out upon. But he kept his eyes resolutely ahead, away from the glimpses of sublime achievement beneath him.
Beauty had no place here — not like this. No matter how much the tourists clicked and clacked across the quartz and crystal, oohing and ahing, he would not look down.
He wondered how many of them had even taken a videogram or a panoramiograph of the real attraction — the reason the platform was even here: the ugly crater which once held so many hopes, dreams, lives. None of them seemed to care.
They’ll tell people they visited this place. Not quite the truth.
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