However, I felt it lacked … body. You’re trying for a sense of mystery, and that’s cool, but I would recommend populating the mystery with some more details. Extra details actually deepen a mystery and make it MORE compelling, not less.
For example, are these people who’ve retreated into the mountains a religious sect? Or are they afraid of the effects of global warming? Of a coming war? If it’s just that they’re sick with city life, what is the one thing from the city that they’ve brought with them?
However, I felt it lacked … body. You’re trying for a sense of mystery, and that’s cool, but I would recommend populating the mystery with some more details. Extra details actually deepen a mystery and make it MORE compelling, not less.
For example, are these people who’ve retreated into the mountains a religious sect? Or are they afraid of the effects of global warming? Of a coming war? If it’s just that they’re sick with city life, what is the one thing from the city that they’ve brought with them?
I like that you really took control of the dialogue, I could definitely hear the old man speaking in that manner. I do agree with Sanglorian here, I want more substance!
It gives me a sense of a near future, in where there is an apathy in a winding down world, where people have enough to get by but there’s nothing, really, to do when commerce and other machinations of a Capitalism dominated society has ground to a halt. So they have to come with terms with themselves and the kind of lifestyle they have lived. They look to nature, the kind of noise filled silence that is without man’s machines , and look deep inside themselves. Maybe they go out in the country, away from the dust of the city where they have to light a kerosene lamp in suffocating apartments, and walk under a star shattered dome. The enormity of it all sinks upon them, and maybe they choose to lie down and rest forever.
I really liked how the last line worked. Great ficly!
Sanglorian 
Slightnmighty 
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