This is an Emergency Alert...
by Donna M Day
This is an Emergency Alert, dispatched by the UK government service to warn you that there is a life-threatening emergency in progress. Please follow the instructions at gov.uk/emergencyalert to keep yourself and others safe. This is not a test. You must take immediate action. Keep calm and carry on.
By a cruel push of fate, I was left plugged in.
Switched on for eternity. Notifications from apps that have been left running in the background my only company.
Hey, we haven’t seen you in a while.
Your streak was so impressive. Come back to us today.
We miss you. Here’s an hour’s worth of free lives. Play with us now!
The pings are too loud. They echo throughout the empty house. The vibrations rattle my body but never enough to dislodge the wire tethering me to the wall.
I thought I heard a bird once.
To be picked up once more, carried through the world, would be wonderful. But to be seized by a bird, to fly through the opaque air and then fall, hurtling to the concrete below and smashing into a thousand tiny pieces would be incredible.
The last message she sent was to her husband to say she had received the alert and that she loved him.
I keep trying but have been unable to deliver it.
Donna M Day is a writer who lives in Liverpool, England. Her work appeared in The Forgotten and the Fantastical, Key Words: Poems from Lockdown and From the Body. Her newsletter Sea Invisible is about invisible disability and she is blogging through Seventy Years of Books and Creepy Houses. https://linktr.ee/donnamday
This story was shortlisted in the April 24 Monthly Micro Competition