Nova Terra
Death is a patient man.
Earth-child, I rose from the ground into the sunlit streets of the abandoned city. For a hundred years, only travelling strangers wandered through the broken, shattered streets of New California. Concrete giants and asphalt streets built to last forever were now broken, hopeless reminders of what had been a once glorious civilization. Wires littered the sidewalk, entangled under brush and weeds that had grown through the cracks. Vines rose like conquerors over the concrete walls, covering everything in a green envelope.
No one lives to the age of forty here. If you are extremely lucky, you will find a way to manage maybe thirty years, or unlucky, wither away before the age of twenty-five, with the painful feeling of death eating away at your bones. No one outsmarts the silent reaper.
I sat down on my bed of soft dirt and leaves like a child, my legs crossed and my arms gently laid over them, like the buildings I sat desolate and listened to the wind run rampantly through the holes in my shelter. The sun’s warmth encouraged me to close my eyes and take in deep breaths before entering out into the dangerous world in which I now lived. Wiping the dirt from my face I stared into the reflector, my image wild and dangerous and a child of the earth.
I felt the cold chill of the morning wind rushing in to greet me, whispering through the broken glass and cooling my skin. I could feel my mother’s gaze, and to look the earth in the eyes one more time, to hear that stone-cold goodbye. Terra whispered to me in the dark, “Soon you will join me,” and I felt the cold sting of death. Was there hope for a remnant child like me? Terra only laughed at my thoughts, broken, she flung me to the ground and covered my eyes in dirt.
Then it came, the slow torrent of saltwater flowing from my eyes. I was alone, sixteen and left in this place, Terra plaguing me with her beautiful hair. There was nothing anymore, but the abandoned slumps of what used to be.
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