Prompts for 22 August 2025 from
Write about a riverboat
delicious abstraction
“it’s broken”
A character who is a teenager
Annie leaned back against the wobbly deck chair her father had found near the ancient dock. Staring at the brilliant blue sky, she sighed in delight at the delicious abstraction of an afternoon on the riverboat, as if the world hadn't ended. Life could be hard, these days since the collapse of the city, and she relished the days when she and her father took to the water.
Annie's memories of Before were fading rapidly. Her mother and brothers had died when she was only five, along with much of the East Coast when the massive meteor crashed into the Delaware River, forever changing everything familiar. Annie and her father had been on a trip to California visiting her grandparents on that day or they would probably have died with the rest.
Now, ten years later, Annie and her Father had made themselves a little home in Northwest Georgia. The sleepy Chattahoochee River had become a massive waterway when the Appalachian mountains collapsed into the Atlantic. The quakes that followed turned much of the former eastern United States into a series of lakes, from Houston to Arkansas. Southernmost states became part of the Gulf of the Americas. Of course, the entire Eastern Seaboard was washed away and the new beaches just east of Atlanta were a wild, unfriendly place where alligators roamed, eating sea turtles and any creature that wandered too close. The safest places were the mountains, with the rivers as sources of fresh water and snakefish.
A sharp sound interrupted Annie's reverie. A few muttered curses followed the sputtering of the riverboat's motor. Annie leapt from her chair toward the back of the boat where she saw her father pulling against a long rope that appeared to be entangled with the wheel that kept the motor running.
"What's happened, Da?" Annie could see it was something catastrophic, but couldn't make out the details.
"Wheel picked up a rope from the bottom of the river. Dang thing is wrapped around the wheel, but good. Tried to kill the motor, but it's broken.
"Can you fix it?" Annie was confident that her father could fix anything. "Can I help?"
"Actually, yes to both. Can you swim under the wheel and see what this thing is caught on? If I can get the wheel unstuck, I might could figure a way to at least float us downriver a bit."
Annie stripped off her dress and dove toward the wheel, careful to stay away from anything that might move. Death by wheel was not on her agenda. She knew if she found where the rope came from, her father would make everything work. He always did.
She quickly spied where the rope entered the wheel and popped up to tell her father she needed to dive a little farther to see the source. Before she could say a word, she heard the shot from the riverbank and saw her father fall to the deck. She heard voices behind her and instinctively dove deep.
Thanks
for the prompts! Think this might become another serial???
At least a two parter, please! You can't just stop on a cliffhanger like that! 😂