Day Three: Apocalypse Morning

I step into the sad, tepid light of a bleached sun, stripped of color as it passes through the grey gauze of an overcast sky. The grit of sand and the edges of shattered shells prick the bottom of my feet as my ears are filled with the dull roar of ocean waves pounding in vain against an uncaring shore. A cold wind as sharp as knives flails my flesh as I walk along a deserted beach the color of steel and stone and just as hard, just as cold.  

I look to the sky and I notice the seagulls that normally swoop and screech in this wind tossed sky are conspicuous by their absence. There should be seagulls but no. The sky is empty.  

The shoreline is also empty except for me who stands upon it in the cold, grey, damp morning. There is only the lifeless sand and the waves that pound upon it in rage and futility.  

Against the grey, my eye sees something half-buried in the sand, something small and red. Curious and lacking anything better to do, I walk across the beach to where I see this thing. I bend down and grasping it with my fingers, I pull it from its sandy prison.  

It’s a hat, specifically a cap, a red cap. I brush away the sand caked to the fabric of the cap. I can’t help but chuckle to myself when I see what I fully expected to see, the white letters over the brim. 

Make America Great Again. 

I look around me and I realize I am well and truly alone. I look down to the cap with its cracked white letters against the fading red background, mocking me. 

Perhaps I should raise my fist to the sky and scream in rage against the ghosts of those who have left me here alone. “Damn  you! Damn you all to hell!” 

But there’s no one to hear my anger, my frustration, my loneliness. 

And my head is cold. 

I brush away the last of the sand from the cap, I put it on my head and continue on my way against the unforgiving wind.