February’s Pictonaut Challenge

January is dead. It’s corpse has been stripped of its clothes, jewellery, money and anything of even tenuous value. It now lies cooling in a shallow grave in the middle of the desert of time. That’s just how time roles. It takes you for everything you have and leaves you dead and forgotten. Time is the bastard’s bastard. Cheery today aren’t I? Things were looking up, things were looking good, but then last night dinner went a bit pear-shaped, though not literally, no pears were involved. The cheese sauce bubbled over, it was very messy, it delayed things, it was massively inconvenient. There were no words in any language living or dead that could adequately convey my profound and abiding sense of anger and sadness. It was, in essence, the human condition. These are the trials I face in my life and I am left the worse for it. I swear it was going to be all sunshine and lollipops, unicorns and gumdrop mountains, but now? Now it’s going to be all grim-dark misery and the palpable despair of life in a universe that is as cruel as it is cold. This month we’re going down the rabbit hole and treading where no man should ever set foot. This month we’re going to the Dead Places.

There’s something morbidly glorious about the dead husk of a building, something that is falling to bits, somewhere that nature is slowly beginning to reclaim. It speaks to you in ways that a whole and intact building just doesn’t. It echoes of the transience of all human endeavour. They hold a loneliness but also a serenity. A purity of purpose and a nobility in death. Of course the internet had to go a ruin (that’s a pun that is) by coining the term Ruin Porn. Thanks internet! This picture is from the ghostly and frankly unearthly, innards of the abandoned House of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Which rather unsurprisingly, is in Bulgaria.

You have a month the churn out a 1,000 word short story (or as I call them, wordascopes) based on the image above. But of course February only has 28 days, not 30 or 31, so you best get cracking.