Gone With the Window

Through the window Calum could see the pleasant grass lawn studded with brilliant buttercups, the trickling stream that bordered the garden and beyond that the soft, rolling hills that stretched into the distance. It was a vista of pure joy and relaxation that he never grew tired of.

“You’re doing it again!” The shrill, whining voice interrupted Calum’s reverie. He blinked and looked away from the window, briefly, at his haggard looking wife. “Why can’t you pay me half the attention you pay that, that window?!”

Calum shrugged slightly and turned back to the window.

“It’s all we have left,” he murmured, “all there is of Earth.”

A thin screech was all the warning he got as his wife advanced with a heavy saucepan and swung it with all her strength. The pan collided against the window with a sharp crack and the view disappeared in a haze of static and a spider web of cracks. A quiet electrical fizz was all that broke the stunned silence.

“What have you done?” Calum looked aghast at his wife, who stood there panting, pan held limply in one hand. “Now there’s nothing left. It’s all gone.”

Outside, through several feet of solid rock, the toxic wind howled across the barren landscape, blasted rock showing no sign that life had ever had a hold there.

Gareth is unofficially the second most widely translated SF short story author in the world.