Ink Splatters - Contest Entries & Random Ideas

Gone #planetorplastic entry

Grandmother tells stories of fish. She says as a little girl, her mother and father would make the trip from their home, and drive hours to the sea.

I've never done that.

When Father was a boy, the world leaders make a drastic decision to melt the ice caps for water. The human race was drying up. Rivers flowed into the shrinking, salty oceans. They caught the fresh water and drank it all up. The world drank it too fast.

I've seen the oceans. They are protected now. I've walked on the beach strewn with plastic and could see the beach. Grandmother scoffed at my amazement at such a small bit of water. "My dear child," she said. "This a swimming pool compared to what it was 85 years ago."

"Where did it go?"

Grandmother said, "Gone. Gone with our human dignity. Gone with the wales and fish. Gone. And replaced by plastic."

Grandmother made her own clothes. She refused to wear the government issued jumpsuits. "Why Grandmother?"

"Your clothing carries the death of the ocean."

"Oh, but Grandmother," I said. "Our clothing is recycled from plastic waste!"

Grandmother leaned forward and plucked a loose thread from my shoulder. "This comes off our clothes when we wash them," she said. "We fill the oceans with tiny strings that we can't pick up."

Grandmother was right. The remaining population of the world all surround the last ocean. To say goodbye. The scorching sun drank it up, leaving the salty and rocky ground. And we went home. We went home and began to burn.

Within no time at all, the equator began to bake. The people ran up to the north. Most didn't make it. A sip of water became the rarest commodity. And the most valuable. Grandmother lived on top of a water well. It's how my family and I lived so long. Every day, we would go to Grandmother's to fill up our jugs. One day, as we walked down the dusty, dry roads to her home, shots rang out. Grandmother's well had been discovered and taken. Grandmother was dead.

Our family knew we had little time left. We hid in the mountains, drinking from a spring that produced only two gallons of water a day. Every day, it produced less and less.

We woke up one day with a forest fire raging around us. We made it out. But fires from around the world heated it up. The only place where you could go outside was Antarctica. My family and I barely made it there, hiding from the wars of staving humans. The people there found ways to get the water underground. We lived off that for a while. But Antarctica was never colonized for a reason. It is not healthy. People died off one by one.

Mother died. Then my brother. Then sister. Then father. I was alone.

I am the last human on earth. I am alone. I'm am dying. I am gone. Gone with the Oceans.