Dust
2028
I pressed my palm to the desk. It had a thick blanket of dust covering its wood veneer. In the dust there were now ten palm prints, each fading more and more into the snowy grey. Ten years, five fingers and one palm for each. At one point, ten years ago, I sat behind this desk and taught high school students English. I tried to make it interesting for them.
"Language is alive and always changing. If you had teachers before me, and they told you there were rules in English, I am sorry, but they lied to you." "What matters is understanding."
But the room was silent now. The air was stale. I don't know why I keep coming back, year after year. To remember, I suppose.
2018
It had been in the news for months now. Grain shortages. North American dust bowl. The Second Depression. Sixty percent of the world's grain production had been lost to drought in a matter of months.
Then famine set in. Africa is in civil war, as is most of the middle east, China, and a good portion of Eastern Europe.
Oil exports have dropped to zero, and so international shipping has come to a complete halt. No foreign aid is to be provided.
But this is for good reason. We can hardly provide for ourselves, much less try and save the rest of the world. They are on their own. We all are.
Our infrastructure had to change. Previously, thanks to oil, we were all nice and spread out. You could spend thirty minutes driving at sixty miles and hour and not think twice about it.
So we have consolidated. Close-knit communities were built around the last bits of land that were left that could sustain grain and cattle.
work in progress
I pressed my palm to the desk. It had a thick blanket of dust covering its wood veneer. In the dust there were now ten palm prints, each fading more and more into the snowy grey. Ten years, five fingers and one palm for each. At one point, ten years ago, I sat behind this desk and taught high school students English. I tried to make it interesting for them.
"Language is alive and always changing. If you had teachers before me, and they told you there were rules in English, I am sorry, but they lied to you." "What matters is understanding."
But the room was silent now. The air was stale. I don't know why I keep coming back, year after year. To remember, I suppose.
2018
It had been in the news for months now. Grain shortages. North American dust bowl. The Second Depression. Sixty percent of the world's grain production had been lost to drought in a matter of months.
Then famine set in. Africa is in civil war, as is most of the middle east, China, and a good portion of Eastern Europe.
Oil exports have dropped to zero, and so international shipping has come to a complete halt. No foreign aid is to be provided.
But this is for good reason. We can hardly provide for ourselves, much less try and save the rest of the world. They are on their own. We all are.
Our infrastructure had to change. Previously, thanks to oil, we were all nice and spread out. You could spend thirty minutes driving at sixty miles and hour and not think twice about it.
So we have consolidated. Close-knit communities were built around the last bits of land that were left that could sustain grain and cattle.
work in progress