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Attention please, demanded the terrifying alert sent to all mobile devices. A nuclear strike has been launched at our major cities. You have 3, repeat 3 minutes to take shelter after this broadcast ends. May God help us all—end of message.
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Posted in response to @feltbuzz's Zapfic Monday contest
The prompt is Terrify
The image is my own.
We practiced for this when I was in grade school, only we had three minutes to get under our desks. Lotta good that would do. I wonder how that early fright has shaped how I view, and move in, the world today. I took easily to prepping, like I took easily to getting rid of lice in my home.
I remember hearing about 'Duck and cover' as a kid and thinking it quite hilarious.
Lice, ugh. I seem to recall you mentioning that. The dog was it?
no no the lice was long ago, nearly 30 years. I went berserk. Fortunately, I lived in Brooklyn at the time, and could take my children to a "nitpicker," who would spend hours picking nits from their heads. I vacuumed constantly, washed bedding constantly, thought like a louse. It was excellent training for the flea problem I had recently. Very much as if the sky were falling.
You write the most wonderful micro fiction stories of all.
A nitpicker? Really? I'd no idea such a thing existed, though the word had to have come from somewhere.
Thanks for the kind words. This one took some whittling down to 240 characters, but I find it fun and good exercise.
I remember her name, Nahama Mermelstein. She was a member of the Hasidic community. There were many others, and we mothers of school-aged children kept them very busy. We had to smear kosher margarine into the child's hair before bed, wrap the head in plastic wrap, then take the child to her front porch the next morning, along with the box that the margarine had come in to prove we used kosher. Then the poor child had to sit still for a very long time while the nit picker drew a lice comb through her hair, a small batch at a time. The hair was partitioned by a pencil, bit, by bit. She was very thorough, and guaranteed that she had gotten 100% of the nits. I remember my eldest sitting there crying the whole time. But it worked. Along with my ceaseless cleaning at home, and daily nitpicking of my own, outside in the sun. Thankfully, I only had the problem once.
That's a very funny scene you paint!:) I wonder if a child ever gets over being covered with margarine and clingfilm.
When she heard lice was in the school she was attending five years later, she sobbed uncontrollably.
I don't remember three minutes. I remember we had to get under those desks right away. I used to look at the large windows that almost covered a wall. I'd wonder, even as a child, how going under a desk would protect us with all the glass there. Even if radiation didn't get us, the shattered glass surely would.
I wonder what it did to the psyches of my generation (grade school--early fifties) to grow up looking at windows and waiting for the bomb to drop.
I suppose a sturdy desk might offer some protection from falling ceilings. Where else could children go in a very short time? I wonder how many children had your thoughts, that the desks were no protection at all? I don't remember what I thought, I just did it.
Population-wide victim mentalities make the populations easier to manage. Given the behavior we saw recently, how very easy it was to rob us of nearly everything in our lives outside of our homes, I'd say we have been systematically conditioned to obey obviously irrational directives from our governments for many years now, and that business under the desks was just one of them.
To be fair, I was a very serious child :))
Not surprising to me at all! I was clueless, as far as I can remember. Just trying to not make any adults mad at me, back in the day when it was OK for a teacher to rap a child's knuckles with a ruler. Or worse for some school children I'm sure, but I only suffered the ruler treatment.
Time to enjoy life for 3 more minutes or to hide with the cockroaches. That's the question.
Just enough time for a last coffee. Thank goodness for the alert.
3 minutes? Not even time to climb down the stairs 🤣
That's a long staircase you have. Are you living in a mansion?:)
2nd floor apartment 😢
Oh goodness. I really am dim. I forgot all about apartments:)
And I upvoted my own bloody comment instead of yours!;(
Yeah, I don't like it, but alone houses are so damn expensive
This is !INDEED terrifying.
3 minutes!
Worse if it was only 2 minutes:)
But such is life.
Some things that happen don't even give a warning.
That’s some very short three minutes there😪
Just enough time to kiss your sweet ass goodbye!:)
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Hehehehe alert message is on point, this will send that chivvy down my whole body. Happy it's for Zapfic and not my actual real life condition. This message can give heart attack
🙃
#hive #posh
#hive #zapfic
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