Here is another flash fiction story. Christmas in nature. Warm fuzzy. Not one of my favorites. I felt constricted by the 1000 word limit the contest I was doing it for had. But it’s up here now. Maybe I will whittle it down one day.

Nathan’s footsteps echoed through the hallway of the underground shelter. There was a spring to Nathan’s step today: it was Christmas day after all. It was the only holiday that he and his brother celebrated anymore–the only one they both remembered celebrating with their parents.

Nathan could see his breath as he made his way down the corridor. It was always very cold in the morning–the shelter’s heating system shut down at night to conserve energy.

Nathan poked his head into the control room. It looked as though all the machines were in order, quietly humming and beeping away. Just last week, he fixed the shelter’s distressed beacon, which had broke after the first six months in the shelter–back when Ms. Neumann was still alive. There had been something wrong with the shelter system’s clock; everything had been running off-synch and consequently nothing worked properly, the beacon included. Ms. Neumann had tried fixing it, but she was an English teacher and not much of an electrical engineer.