Day 58: Flavours

Another writing prompt, this one about noting down 12 flavours, of ice cream, sweet, savoury food, whatever, and then writing a scene including all the flavours, starting with the words "The sparkling water was..."

The sparkling water was tangy, like Stilton, on Booker's tongue. She swallowed it down and looked out at the horizon. The first of the drop ships were landing on the ridge to the east. By the end of the night royalist troops should have taken back the city, and fresh supplies -- including clean drinking water -- would hopefully begin to flow out to the camps once again.

Booker took a bacon-and-cauliflower-bake capsule from her pack and snapped it open, and poured the drops of concentrated liquid within onto her ration of boiled cabbage. She ate hungrily, trying not to look down at her fork.

The sky was dark and the polythene cover of her compartment snapped in the wind. Booker sat on the corrugated tin roof, painted mint green to signify her refugee status, and settled in to watch the fireworks. Hundreds of miles away balls of orange flame popped like exploding grapefruit against the black of the sky. The royalist aerial bombardment had begun. Scattered plasma fire, pink like the bubblegum Booker had once chewed with her classmates at school, ripped loosely into the night -- Iphal militia fighting back.

Booker thought about her school, wondered whether any of those fiery blooms in the distance was the site of her childhood memories going up in smoke. She thought she remembered rebels taking the school as a stronghold, after Arch Pasha Monsul promised to free the country. But maybe that was the gym. Those days had been a blur. Booker hadn't wanted to leave home because she had been baking pecan slices in the reactor oven -- she hadn't understood, was annoyed at her father, but he had grabbed her wrists and pulled her to the door, and Booker had been halfway to yelling, had felt full of fury, but then she had seen the worry and terror in his face, and had fallen silent.

She thought then about her father's whiskers, about the scent of chocolate and vanilla on his skin when he used to return home from the factory and put his ID and payment chips on the sideboard and gather Booker in his arms...

She didn't want to think about that. She chewed the last of the mush in her bowl, licked it clean, and stowed it back through the flap that was the one window of her hut.

The plasma fire was more sporadic now; Iphal were losing.

Everything was as Monsul's soldiers, clean and fastidious in their caramel uniforms, had said it would be. They had marched through the camps two days ago, handing out lemons and loaves and that funky-tasting sparkling water, and promised that the city would be freed by the end of the week. Some refugees had cheered. Most, like Booker, had looked on, starved and exhausted, wondering whether these tall warriors were going to undo the last three years, wipe the survivors memories clean of the atrocities they had witnessed, or whether these new liberators would be another layer added to the palimpsest of this small but bloodied country, scratching their mark crudely over the top, yet never quite erasing the horrors that had gone before.

Away at the edge of sight another fireball erupted, and Booker, sitting with the wind whipping at her skinny legs, perched on top of her makeshift house, watched as her town was demolished with engines of fire so that the charred remains could in the morning be presented back to her. She sighed, and looked out.