livin'

He got into the truck. The seat was covered with dust, he could feel how rough it was, even though he was wearing thick jeans. He got into the truck, and let out a few coughs. The dust scratched his throat. His eyes were already watering. He got into the truck, closed the doors, turned the key in the ignition, the engine sputtered to life. He pressed the button to clean the inside, and the car used electricity to shock the air into being clean. The technology was old, the car was a few decades old. But it had been the best he could get. It did the job. It was pretty noisy though. It whirred. But you could barely hear it above the glowering crumbling fire. The cracks and snaps of wood. How did any remain? Scientists said that wood had accelevolved. It had grown fast, in tune with the fires and the disasters. In a few generations, they would need archaeologists to tell them that wood had once taken years to grow, that it was fragile, that it had not always been like steel. Even now, kids these days did not know or believe what wood had once been like. They hadn’t seen it. It made sense. 

The car began to move. There had once been talk, even designs of cars that would float, vehicles that would fly. Personal vehicles. Not the planes they had once had. There had been some initial interest. That had faded once the world had begun to go to shit. They had begun to focus their efforts on the problems that had been facing them. Too long had you been living in complacency. We spurred you into action. To what end? You need it. To what end? Silence. The voices in his head did not answer. Maybe it was because they had none. Maybe it was because humanity had failed. Eventually, they had given up. Eventually, they had settled back, not in peace, but in fear, and waited for the long night. It had gone on so long that the looters, those who wanted things that they in most cases could not have afforded in their normal lives, even those people had settled in. Can you imagine the worst desires of humanity being satiated? After that, there was nothing left. This was the new normal. No one knew how long this would continue. So amidst the fires, in the floods, under the thunderstorms, everyone moved on. Continued with their lives. Why should they not? This was the new normal.

A pained expression crossed his face as he thought of the kids. The children. They had not known anything else. This was their world. It did not make them stronger. It made them less aware. The beauty they had missed. They did not know what rainbows looked like. They did not know the beauty in water, only its ability to drown. They did not know that fire had once been harnessed, and was not just a sentient force in nature that threatened to burn everything. They did not know that the world they had come into had once been everything.