Everything's been a mess lately, so here's a teensy fictional morsel I wrote from a randomized prompt generator. I apologize for nothing.
Prompt: Write a story in the romance genre. It's about a hermit and should include a garden hose. Also use the sentence 'Not for you.' Bonus prompt: There seems to be no one left on the planet.
The rhythmic sawing of a cricket was the only sound that cut through the silence. Today, at least. Sometimes thunder grumbled from a hundred miles over the barren wheat fields; sometimes crows screamed out curses between bites of desiccated cow.
Reginald rocked on his wooden chair on his empty porch in front of his empty house in the middle of his empty field right at the edge of the empty world. The last time he’d seen a face that wasn’t staring back at him from a cracked and dusty mirror must have been ten years ago. More. Twenty? Thirty?
He glanced at his fingernails as if they would somehow give him an answer. Nothing. Just as cracked and dusty as the mirror.
Reginald sighed. The days as the last man on Earth were pretty boring. Pretty lonely. Nothing like any of those big movies or fancy books used to claim. He didn’t discover monsters or travel to some hidden hideaway where the rest of humanity managed to seclude themselves for the past fifteen years. (Yeah, fifteen, that sounded right.)
His eyes landed on the garden hose curled at the base of the porch. It had a hole. A nice one, it seemed. Almost appeared to be parting its lips, breathless, sucking in a quavery gasp as it asked him for his—
No.
“Not for you,” Reginald grumbled to himself. He wasn’t that lonely.
When the hose winked at him, he realized that, all right, maybe he actually was.
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