15 Stories for 15 Days: Day Twelve

The 15 for 15 contest is held about once every nine months or so. The way it works is that every day at 8:30 WDC time, a picture prompt is posted. You have 24 hours to post your story that the prompt inspires. Here is the interesting part: You only have 15 minutes to write your story. You can think about it all day but once you start writing, 15 minutes is what you get.

ID: 994771   (Rated: 18+) 15 for 15 Contest   Do you have 15 minutes? Come in and join this contest! by Legerdemain (222)

The contest is limited to 50 competitors. Each day, there are 5 winners. First place will get 1004 points, second place will get 1003 points etc. The person with the most total points at the end of the 15 day contest is the winner.

The prompt for this story is the following picture:

My Entry



He’d been there before; Heaven.

It was an aptly named planet and, as he looked up at it now, Jason recalled that he’d been there before.

He’d spent every waking moment of the last twenty years remembering what it had been like to live on Heaven. It was hard to think of anything else. The planet hung so colorfully large in the sky that even if he were to close his eyes, he couldn’t imagine a contrary view.

That was the intent.

That was why he was here and not elsewhere.

They wanted him to remember. They wanted him to feel the agony of a loss unrecoverable.

He’d had a family; a wife and two daughters. She’d be remarried by now; the young ones, grown with families of their own. They would have moved on for there was no grief in Heaven. He would not even exist as a memory for that would bring sorrow, something that those in Heaven couldn’t comprehend.

But he remembered and he felt the grief. He felt the sorrow like a knife through his soul. An instrument of mental anguish whose release handle was just out of reach – like the paradise planet hanging overhead…just out of reach.

Such was his fate. A life filled with memories of what had been lost; a life with no hope of regaining even of glimpse of what once was.

Yes, he remembered Heaven.

And he remembered a time when having everything just wasn’t enough. So he tried to take more.

His crime had been heinous, justifying the punishment given out to only a few.

He remembered Heaven and he remembered the day they’d cast him out. He remembered the ride on the dark, filthy prison ship that took him away to meet his fate.

He remembered disembarking onto the aptly named prison planet and the banner that greeted all men that shared his fate: Welcome to Hell.