Today is Thursday Friday, which means it’s surely time for another of Chuck Wendig’s attempts to break his web server by having his many loyal fans flood it with their responses to his challenges!

The challenge for today is right up my wormhole. I’ve been experimenting more with shorter flash fiction in an attempt to curb my tendency to ramble (the result is a serial of short stories found here) and Chuck now wants his dedicated followers to write a five-sentence story, no more than 100 words. Perfect! This is exactly 100 words (not including the title).

.     .

Colony

.     .

“Come to Cimmeria!” the frenetic advertisements opined, “Amazing Opportunities for All!” Of course, we believed them; we, the desolate and the downtrodden, so desperate for a chance to be masters of our own lives that we signed on the dotted line without reading the fine print. Perhaps they hadn’t known about the psychotropic compound-releasing fungi endemic to Cimmeria, or perhaps they simply didn’t care. Eight thousand colonists driven insane—a public relations nightmare back on Earth, but a literal nightmare for us. Evacuation was never promised and never came, but I don’t mind; you learn to live with madness, eventually.