Tethered (NSFW)

The idea of atomic funerals has always captivated Willow-in-Clay. There's the reek of brimstone about them, the feel of a dark and disfigured god laughing at Man's latest doomed attempt to avoid the Plague's spread. She prayed her way through her share of gravesites, back before she came to realize that it was all for nothing. The bomb is just the next evolution.

So now she lays naked in the lead-bottomed gondola of a hot-air balloon over Mad Hat Canyon, waiting for the updraft. Her companion of the moment, a deceitful little mandroid named Silas-of-Truth, slumps barechested in the bottom of the basket across from her, picking at his fingernails with a rusty pocketknife. She wishes she could hate him, but he's just a generic Bad Boy Survivalist package, not even real enough to despise.

Flames flare above them, and the balloon bobs at the end of its tether.

"What I mostly hate is how cynical it's made me," she tells him, continuing a conversation they'd never begun.

After the Plague (NSFW)

If it was only the memories that the Plague stole, we could have found a way through. We could have talked for days, watched all those videos we never quite got around to playing back, read all the notes that we wrote in the days before it all came apart.

But instead, the Plague stole him from me, left me with the thrashing body, the stream of vulgarities, the piss and the shit, the erections he'd pound until his hand was slick with blood. It stole him and left me, and I stayed, and I stayed, and I stayed.

And now he's dead, this glorious man I gave myself to until death do us part, now he's dead now he's dead, and all I can think now is thank God now I'm free.

~end~

-- 

This one from a /r/WritingChallenges challenge - "Move me in 5 sentences." How'd I do?

Scene from a Post-Apocalyptic Amusement Park

On the ninth day west of Des Moines, the little company came across a crumbling Ferris wheel tilting drunkenly above a starveling cornfield. Here and there, crows picked among the scant remnants. They showed no alarm at the squeaking wagon's approach.

 Angler flapped the reins and Missus Hammeril's pair of horses came to a halt.

 "Oh," Missus Hammeril said, a little sadly. "Orry and I rode one of those, when he was first courting me."

Angler, facing forward with his mistress behind him, rolled his eyes. Exactly who he was rolling them for, he could not say. The crows, maybe.