A decade or two on...

[Joseph Tabbi]

We sleep through the days. An hour or two before sunrise, we each swallow a softgel and gather together our things. Then we step inside before the temperatures hit a hundred (^° F). A second softgel puts us to sleep and the insulated, care conditioned cubicles keep us cool.  At nightfall the shutters snap open; we rise, throw on our shorts and t’s. Our working eve begins. 

Food is transported by bicycle messengers from the farms on the Mississippi river bed, north of Winona. 

Communications arrive by Morse code over a network of recycled antennas, remediated lamposts and the like. Instructions are conveyed by the network owners. The messengers and task managers post the day's agendas; the rest of us, when we have something to report are left to scratch our notations on scraps.

By now the only factories left are the ones that maintain the cubicles, the coffins, and the gels. Bikes are recycled and the cyclists have power. There’s no plastic smooth enough to hold ink and nobody knows any more how to set graphite inside narrow wooden cylinders. We scratch messages on stacks of scrap. As we work through the night our brail-like notations pass from hand to hand, from task master to messenger, to whoever's addressed.

The arctic glaciers have by now melted. The era of hail, red rain, and thunder-snow lasted less than a decade. A drizzle is all that precipitates anymore; the flooding, the chaos – all a memory. Heat lightning in networks cross the sky; rarely bolts.  An entropic humidity at night is the only weather we know now. More monotone than monstrous.

[Jeremy Hight]

We try in 2020 to recall when storms were storms,  when rain was rain, when hail was not oversized and odorous, when winds were benign, perhaps colored by dusts, malodorous from nearby ruin, when clouds were government was just oligarchy,  when dystopia  was the worst vocabulary to pin to time, soil and sky.

We see a  sunrise black widow belly red from our caves and it is just bright enough, enough veined in metaphor beyond the doom to go onward. 

[Alex Mitchell]

"It is the stories that survive, and it is through the stories that we will survive." 

That was what she whispered to me, on her last breath. I had listened to everything she had told me over the past few weeks, her tales of clouds, hail and thunderstorms, of monsters, gods and lesser (but no less frightening) beings. Stories from many years ago, but stories not yet forgotten. Not all of it made sense, and much of it was contradictory, but such is the way of stories, or so she had taught me. 

Now all that is left is for me to pass the stories along to you, and hope that they will bring you some small comfort in the dark days ahead.

[Jeremy Hight]

She watched the cursor slide backwards as though on ice as the paragraphs rained themselves out, the sentences faded updrafts, the verbs and nouns a fading convection, the white space on the computer a sort of pale sky.

She deleted the story.   It was a difficult decision, painful in fact, but it made sense.   

She saw the future as it was to be, a gaping maw,  a mouth of nothing with errant teeth of life and its chaos and breaking.  She saw the way sun would rise over remains, over the reverberations of decisions of near present.  She  saw the ballast in the patterns emergent in her present, the poison waters of poor choices and ugly politics.

The future would need stories.   It would need them in a way even she could not understand, the way of dermis,  the way of keloid,

This story was not clear enough and others had said it in ways far more rich and clear so the delete button slid cursor ever back, to a nothing.