Skeletons - A Campfire Tale

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Come and gather round the campfire my children, and let me tell you the tale of the end of civilization:

Many years ago, when the days grew shorter and the air turned crisp, change was in the air. This year, it was more change than anyone possibly could have anticipated. It began in the most mundane way possible, with economics. Simple market forces precipitated the fall of mankind.

As with so many things, it could be traced back to Covid. People had spent so much on their homes and decorations, so consistently, so expansively, that manufacturers assumed the trend would never end. They forgot that people needed to eat, and food had become cripplingly expensive. In a rare turn of events, the average person put their needs ahead of their wants and bought food instead of décor. Facing endless warehouses full of Halloween décor eating a hole in their bottom line, they did the only thing they could. They steeply discounted the price of all of their items, selling them so low, there was barely a profit to be seen. As a result, this Halloween was the spookiest, with spider webs and large skeletons gracing almost every home. A keen observer might comment that it seemed like an invading army, watching the lives that scurried about beneath them.

October 31st inexorably approached and to those paying attention, a strange feeling began to permeate the air. The voices of those anxious few were dismissed, drowned out by the numb and unaware, the masses anesthetized by the glittering displays of their smartphones. Those alarmist few were correct though, with every purchase and every giant skeleton erected, a ravenous hunger grew stronger and more pervasive.

The fateful day arrived, and humanity marked it as it always did. Children's voices rang out with, "Trick or treat!" Parents indulgently escorted their young on their quest for sugar. Neighbors chatted, exchanging gossip and comparing the expansive displays of decorations. Each household had tried to outdo each other, for neighborhood bragging rights but also in an adult quest for internet glory. Eventually, the children crashed from their sugar highs and were tucked up in their beds, the exhausted parents following close behind. All seemed peaceful as midnight approached. In reality, a tidal wave of destruction was about to be unleashed as the veil between the living and the dead grew to its thinnest.

Every year, the souls of those trapped in the beyond pressed against the veil, seeking passage back to the land of the living. Only a scant few usually managed to cross, resulting in the hardly believed legends and whispered ghost stories. This year though, as the autumnal equinox approached, the searching and desperate souls began to press, they found an unexpected foothold on the other side. Small reserves of unsouled life energy pooled in nearly uniform spacing throughout the lands. Enough that each starving soul, trapped in desolation and agony, could almost grasp it. The veil was too thick, and like a slippery minnow, the sources refused to be held. With slavering anticipation, the souls awaited the thinning of the veil when that energy might finally be within their reach.

You see, through a trick of sympathetic magic, earth and humanity had reached an unexpected crossroads. Human pollution had spread microplastics nearly everywhere, permeating every man, woman, and child, on an unprecedented cellular level. Regardless of the destruction they were wreaking, plastic production recklessly proceeded, like a car careening off a cliff. In a bid to sate consumer desires, the manufacturers had made millions if not billions of skeletons. The humans, with plastics deep within themselves, molded these skeletons in their most fundamental image, a link was forged. A small amount of every contaminated human's life energy began to flow to these seemingly innocuous decorations. The skeletons were inert but laden with potential.

Now you understand how, when midnight arrived, the skeletons were no longer just shaped bits of plastic. The oldest and most desperate souls were finally able to grasp the life energy they needed and wrenched themselves from the beyond into the land of the living. It was a small, tenuous foothold, and starving for more life they turned on the living. In the largest extinction event since the asteroid and the dinosaurs, the possessed skeletons and sucked the life from the living. There was no defense possible. How can one kill something that is already dead? In less than an hour, humanity went from being the dominant species on the planet to hardly having any members left.

These massacring souls were finally sated and full of life for the first time in thousands of years. Triumphantly, they took their first look at the land they had so yearned for, that they had fought so hard to get back to. Their triumph turned to horror as the air seemed to burn inside them. The heavens, once the source of awe and wonder were all but blotted out. Tracks of chemicals scarred the land, poisoning all it touched. The landscape was so drastically changed, it was unrecognizable. The sympathetic magic that enabled their resurrection still linked the spirits, and their horror reached a fever pitch. The land of the living was now worse than the land of the dead. There was nothing left for them here anymore.

Conferring with each other, these once desperate, now despairing souls came quickly to a unanimous decision. The land of the living was not their home any longer, and they returned to the land of the dead. It was as simple as letting go of their grasp and falling back to where they belonged.

As each soul released the energy they consumed, the energy that anchored them there, that energy once again was undirected. Unsouled. The energy, seeking its original state, went deep into the ground, becoming one with nature from whence it had sprung.

As the days and months passed, the few humans left banded together in small communities, the goal now simple survival. Technology was lost as the plants ground to a halt with no one to man them. Man became primitive once more.

With each passing day though, Mother Earth became more awake. The constant humming and thrumming that had lulled her to sleep had ceased. As she grew more aware, she became cognizant of the fact that she once again had a large repository of life energy. This confused her for a while as she knew she had given it away when she created life long, long ago. She took stock of her surface and was surprised. There were new substances, made from her, yes, but so changed that they were not living, and yet not able to die either. They broke the cycle.

The solution was obvious. She shaped the life that had been returned to her and made new organisms that would help the things die and break down to their previous states. This pleased her. Without decomposition, the new could not be made. What lovely new things were halted from existing because their components were trapped? She settled in, contented to watch with a satisfied anticipation, and see what new life would come from this new death.

And so my children, the effect on Earth's surface was immediate. Plastics that had existed from when they were first invented began to degrade and decompose. Roller skates, industrial barrels, car bodies, shopping bags, nanoplastics inside the remaining humans' bodies, all began to break down. The humans were violently ill at first, but most of the remaining survived the purge. Afterwards, they experienced a health that they hadn't known they were missing. And all of the earth seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, as the stars once more twinkled brightly in the heavens.