A Collection of Short Stories

TJ Benson
Pretty Bird
The war had just ended and people were remembering how to fall in love again.
That was when she met him at a makeshift healing centre not far from a wrecked
village. He had been wounded in the war against the machines and that was good enough
reason. He said her eyes were his reason. He refused to be discharged after the metal bits
had been removed from his leg. Rumour had it that some people were rebuilding some
villages nearby and settling in. Could they find a place together? At least until some form of
government was set up. This was not the time to live alone. She smiled at her tray of needles
and said yes. But he would do all the building and repairs. She would try to remember how
to cook. The last time she cooked had been before the war.
He took off his blood-stained jacket and put it on her shoulder. It was getting cold, he said.
That was the first time she felt something. But she could never be sure. After a war where all
you loved was taken away, you unlearn love. You learn how to detach from fond memories,
unless you wanted to die before you die. She had no wish to die. So she’d survived a war
without knowing why. Until he came into the centre with his blue eyes. Eyes that had been
altered for night vision by some tech kid in what used to be India. He said he used to be
Nigerian. She said she used to be Ghanaian. It was the first time she was admitting out loud,
that the world as she knew it had ended.
They took off at night. The ruins, which ranged from small craters to deep chasms that ate
up entire roads, led the way to the first village. They got there just as the sun was rising from
behind the hills of rubble. All the good buildings were occupied. They found a compound of
circular and square huts at the fringe of the village. Most of them had been torn down by the
faceless machines, for which no organization or nation had claimed responsibility. Nobody
ever saw them; just the fire and bullets they spat from the sky. And the charred remains when
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