Colony

by Brigitte Winter

I squint my eye at the tiny green bud – and growl.

I should’ve known. The elders have been wheezing. Something is wrong in the air. Too moist, maybe. Too warm. This planet seemed so promising – encased neatly in ash when the previous inhabitants obliterated themselves millennia ago.

Now we’ll have to leave.

I picture my females at home in the caves, heavy with eggs – all the little ones who will never skitter around the planet’s perfect dry beaches – and I crush the bud, driving it deep into the cracked, gray earth. I growl again, softer this time, and slink away.



Author bio: Brigitte Winter is a collector and teller of stories, a jewellery-maker, a wannabe world traveller, and the Executive Director of Young Playwrights’ Theater, a Washington, DC non-profit that inspires young people to realize the power of their voices through creative writing (www.yptdc.org). Brigitte’s short fiction is featured in Columbia Writers’ 2014 anthology, Trapped Tales (http://goo.gl/Bkdvnu), and her micro fiction has been published in 101 Fiction, Nail Polish Stories, and Alban Lake Publishing’s November 2014 Drabble Harvest journal, Tourism on Other Worlds. She loves boundary-busting speculative fiction, and she is currently working on a pre-apocalyptic coming-of-age adventure novel. All of her celebrity crushes are on authors. Visit Brigitte online at www.brigittewinter.com.

Colony is part of 101 Fiction issue 7.