Creative Writing – Fiction – The Future2 Essay, Research Paper
I remember a place was crowded when the dance-floor was full. I remember hunger was when it was dinner-time and I hadn’t eaten since lunch. I remember when pollution was a brown cloud coming out of a car, dispersing and disappearing soon after. I remember when a house was where a family lived, and appartment buildings had rooms. I remember when suicide was a drastic and tragic act, not an everyday occurance. I remember the days when “the future” held disaster if we wouldn’t heed the warnings and change our ways.
Nobody sees me, and I may not be able to talk, but I hear every word they say. They probably think I don’t understand; they think I don’t care. I’ve come to understand that my days are numbered, but from what I see their days are numbered as well. I am a celery plant: root, stem, and leaves; living under Dexter’s blanket. Nobody but Dexter and his mom know about me, and they’re saving me for “a moment of true desperation”. If you ask me, the moment is now, but I don’t complain. At age 15 and 5′7″, Dexter weighs 80 pounds and his mother weighs the same at one inch shorter. One day they’ll finally consume me, but they shouldn’t kid themselves that it will make any difference. Their time is approaching.
We’ve lived like this ever since Dexter can remember, but not me. I remember long before this wretched hole we call home. I remember the farmer who planted me and the years and years of being cropped and regrowing again. It was very hard for me to tell, but indeed I noticed the sky growing more and more muddy year by year. Every year it seemed to me that the farmer’s plot of land grew smaller, and the population of my fellow vegetables and fruits seemed to be decreasing as our land grew scarce. My first years I would grow tall and stiff, green as any blade of grass at the time. I had sunlight aplenty, and remember the rain tasting pure and good. Towards my final years in the dirt, I was warmer than ever before, but never felt the sun’s light as I once had. The rain was sour and the earth from which I drew my nutrition
From what I’ve made of it, in days long ago, these rediculous beasts the humans decided to put themselves above the other animals of the land and sea, and began working and surviving by means different than those of mother nature. They invented artificial machines, great and small, to make the tasks necessary to them easier, and dishonored nature in the process. For centuries they have been taking far more than their fair share of natures bounty, burning and wasting much to create little. Their great fires, artificial and natural, slowly began filling the atmosphere with smoke and other atrocities, and ruined the air, rain, and earth with their pollution.
On top of their greedy misuse of nature’s gifts, they saw fit to test the boundaries of the world in terms of living space. Not only were humans rapidly running out of resources with which to feed themselves and stay alive, but they also had no place to put their rapidly multiplying species. Now they find themselves living in any hole with breathing space, fighting their fellows like fools for insignificant scraps of food which were once bountiful. Here I sit, my roots torn from the once good earth that fed us all, soon to be a useless meal to two useless individuals fallen victim to the foolishness of the greater race.
Now I am doomed to live only in waiting for an inevitable death. Every day Dexter wakes up and checks with his soiled, ruff hands to assure himself that I am right where he left me. Here he sits, every day, steering clear of the occasional fights and raids by other appartments. It’s quite a surprise I’ve lasted so long, I reckon I’ve been here with them for at least two months. I can feel myself rotting inside, but every day he just pats me in the morning and pats me in the evening. He rarely even discusses me with his mother any more. It’s like I’m just here for two pats a day. The future looks dreary.