My 20th Freewrite!
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Here is my 5 minute #freewrite on today's prompt. Yes, I’m a cheat who keeps going long after my 5 minutes are up, and I try to catch all typos before posting. If you'd like to join the fun, check 
Today's freewrite is a sequel to a story in progress. It began with Tuesday's "Not Smart" prompt: Book-smart, common-sense stupid | Day 354: 5 Minute Freewrite: Prompt: not smart
Orange Blossom: Special Delivery
Ennis huddled inside the cave,
trying to comprehend the magnitude of what she had seen with her own eyes. Only in dreams do people see such things. Therefore, she had only dreamed that all her people, celebrating on the mountainside, were gone in a flash.
The gentle rains had allowed crops to grow and hopes to ripen, and the gathering on the mountain was a celebration, until a sudden storm ripped the sky apart. One mighty lightning bolt was all it took. Like a walnut under a hammer, the rocky mountain slope just cracked wide open. The rain-drenched earth gave way, almost liquefying, and land poured down like a waterfall of mud and broken homes.
And people. Her people.
She listened for the rain to stop falling. For forty days and nights, or forty hours, or forty years, it all felt the same, Ennis stayed in the cave she'd found on the mountaintop, the safe haven in the storm, for her and only her. Her wireless set, embedded in a crystal earring, delivered nothing but static. Luckily, she could still access whole libraries full of information she’d downloaded and kept safe inside her head.
She was too young to know this firsthand, but Ennis knew it from the wisdom shared by others before her: people never learn. Civilizations rise and fall, and out of the dust, new cities and nation-states rise again. Matter could not be created or destroyed, but life would go on. It was the way of the universe.
Kind, wise alien saviors could pack a few chosen people into a starship to start all over in a shiny new world, but the guardians couldn’t turn their backs on the childish humans even for a minute. Entrusted with the freedom to govern themselves, the humans would make the same mistakes.
Colonists, a particular breed of people, always learn but never remember an inconvenient truth: the most desirable places to live, with stunning views and pleasant climates, are also the most dangerous.
Everyone wants to claim the scenic overlook as his home. How many settlers can fit on a mountain or along a river before the wild frontier is just another fortress of cement and roads slashing through no-longer-pristine meadows and forests? Wetlands are paved over; homes are built in wildfire-prone areas; the coast, notorious target of hurricanes, is heavily developed.
The homes seem to defy gravity, perched along sheer cliffs overlooking splendid views of the new planet. Eternal optimists, the colonists forget how natural disasters strike with expected yet “unforeseen” frequency and ferocity. Nature can hammer the wilderness and life will go on, but human development magnifies the suffering that follows the storm.
People remember only lived experiences, never mind how many times Grandpa warned about the blizzard of April 1858 or the floods of October 2032. You can show them the historical records, and still, they cannot conceive of some cataclysmic event happening in their own lifetime--not even if the rocks, the science, the history books, tell them lightning really does strike twice in the same place.
Pioneers are optimists, and they’re not good at assessing risk. Build a house right at the foot of a big steep hill? Sure, why not!
Book Smart, Common-Sense Stupid,
they called her, or N.S., which morphed into "Ennis" -- Not Smart.
After hours and hours or days and nights of this, thinking and listening and wondering what would become of her, Ennis finally heard the sound of silence. No more raindrops striking the stone above her and around her. Stretching, blinking, she made up her mind to get up and walk to the sliver of a door.
The mud and broken trees were hard to discern in the murky gray, and she didn’t want to discern them.
She had cried all the tears a human body could produce, for about the next ten or twenty years at least, if she lived beyond the season. Still, Ennis had to swallow a lump in her throat. Down there, buried in mud, her family and friends had breathed their last.
It would only make sense to fling herself into the muck and join them.
A dark shadow glided down to her, and the biggest bird Ennis had ever seen hovered before her face. “Oh!” she cried out, her voice raspy. “Hello, my friend!”
The bird gave no indication it heard, but something fell as the great wings flapped and her hoped-for friend flew off into the sky.
At her feet lay a white blossom, so sweet she could smell it even before she stooped to pick it up. An orange-tree blossom, or something very very close to that, according to the library of books inside her head.
A flower from afar, fresh and white, delivered to her.
There was something more out there,
something near enough that a bird could fly to her with a flower in its beak and deliver it to her fresh, unwilted. Hope landed like a feather in her heart, and Ennis knew the end might have come for the others, but for her this was only the beginning.
(End of Part 2)
Until next time,
Keangaroo
because Kean sounds like Kane (not keen, hint, hint)
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