[ WP ] Write the final journal entry of an old man who has lived to see society rebuild itself after an apocalyptic scenario .

The fire loved everything. It sprang from one place to another, licking the walls of every building with light and heat. It was like a jealous lover, scorned. The fire was greedy, and it consumed everything. Its nothing short of pure chance that anyone survived after we traded blows in a nuclear grudge match. Everyone had shelters. It was the age of the nuclear family, the age of the atom, an age of promise. Such a wondrously fulfilling lie that was. Before the fire there were sirens. 
 
 The sirens wailed one day in early fall, October I think. I don ’ t really remember the sirens clearly, mostly my father rushing my sisters and I into the shelter in the basement. Mother and Aunt Annabelle were getting groceries for one last cookout with hotdogs, cookies and punch. After the first dull thud that was more reverberation than sound Father said he was going to look for Mother. He left my sisters and I in that shelter in the basement, and he never came back, there were two more dull reverberating thuds that same night. My sisters, Carol and Mary, cried for two days. On the third day I said I would find Mother and Father, so I dared to open the shelter door. That ’ s when I saw it, the fire. 
 
 There was nothing above the shelter, our home was gone and I was staring from a shallow pit up into guts of a hellstorm, the skeletons of other homes alight in nuclear flame. The heat was too much, I closed the door to the shelter and my sisters began to cry. I began to pray in the firestorm, but then I stopped. I don ’ t know why I stopped, I wasn ’ t angry or in disbelief, I just stopped. I haven ’ t prayed since. Perhaps that was the end of the world, right there in that little moment when a young boy stopped praying. Today is much different. 
 
 Others, by pure chance, survived the bombs and the fire. Two weeks after the bombs ended the world, my sisters and I emerged, and we found others. Only a few at first, but we kept finding more with time. Eventually, what few thousands of us survived out of millions across this little blue world banded together in a way that I never imagined possible. There was no hate, and there was no misunderstanding. Spoken language was nearly irrelevant because we all spoke the language of loss, so we overcame any obstacles of communication. 
 
 Small villages were made first, a patchy network of people living in the remains of the apocalypse. All it took was time and the love born out of a terrible suffering shared with one another to begin rebuilding into something more grand than a few basic shelters. I like to think that those nuclear fires made us into a global nuclear family, and no one wants to hurt their family. Today there are seven cities, seven real cities, with paved roads, libraries, and farms stretching beyond the city limits. 
 
 Today is very different. Perhaps I ’ ll go pray now. Maybe the world will be born again, when an old man prays for the first time. 

