Light cannot exist without her sister darkness and the same can be said in reverse. But, even when they go hand in hand they're complete opposite.
This anthology is the same.
From demons, wicked and lusty, to pure angels, gods longing for love or...
With fury, anguish and disgust they swarmed from the oceans to our cities. The coasts were the first to fall. In the end, they proved their technological superiority and conquered us as if we were nothing more than cockroaches.
The Homo sapiens was no longer the top of the food chain. They were.
Mermaids. Sirens. Fish people… We gave them many names in our legends but the truth was way different than the myth.
The Laicqerians, as they called themselves, would never have bothered humanity if it wasn’t for our polluting and destructive ways.
By 2030 the oceans and seas of our Earth were so filled with all kinds of plastic objects that people couldn’t swim in them without finding, at least, ten bottles or bags. The endangered species list became almost endless by the inclusion of every marine lifeform. Every day you could find animals dying in the beaches because of the plastic inside their stomach or strangling their bodies. By 2030 we were one step away from killing— once and for all— our oceans.
That was when the Laicqerians came and it marked the end of our tyrannical reign over our blue planet. Treated as slaves and criminals, we were divided into two groups: the ones in charge of cleaning our mess and the ones helping to breed the new marine generations.
The caretakers were a select group that lived around the artificial inland seas created as breeding grounds. As former environmentalists and nature lovers they were the most pampered humans in the new world order. But not everyone was so lucky.
I, like the rest of the cleaners, had to work day in and day out cleaning the beaches and waters we, and so many other generations before us, polluted. It didn’t matter if you were too old, sick or pregnant— like in my case— you had to break your back working for the future wellbeing of the planet or they would simply dispose of you.
My future would be to die picking up the garbage of others but at least my baby wouldn’t share my fate. Laicquerians would take my child at the moment of birth to be raised as one of their own, away from humanity’s corruption. At least he would be pampered like the caretakers were.
Living under the mer people’s rule was hard but I wasn’t angry at them; neither with my upcoming loss nor with how bad have they treated us. Why? I knew they were taking justice in their hands. Just as in the past we had laws that punished murder intent against another human we deserved to be punished for slowly killing our home. They were right: we were nothing more than criminals and destroyers.
We deserved our extinction.
My son’s tiny but sudden kick pulled me out of my thoughts. “Don’t you worry, my little star,” I said, caressing my swollen belly. “Mommy will keep working so you can live in a better planet.”
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************************ A/N: ThisismyentryforNationalGeographic's #PlanetOrPlasticwritingcontest; whichwasmovedherefororganizationpurposes. I chosetheplanetandyou?
