An Apocalypse (just for kicks)
Our vows have been long since forgotten, and she has exhausted her patience. Through shearing and tainting and scarring she continued to provide. With increasing frequency and decreasing respect, her treasures were adopted as ours: earth, air, water.
At first she cried and bled. Rivers hungry for bigger and better banks escaped their ancient paths and spread over the land like malevolent comforters. Ocean swells swallowed cities whole. All cities became Atlantis and curiosity about their disappearance eventually dried up and blew away just as our storm clouds eventually would. High rise apartment buildings and 30-storey factories succumbed, slowly drowned by inexorably rising waters.
Her sweat made the humidity insufferable in all four corners of the globe. She cascaded pea-soup fog through the Serengeti; it rolled in asphyxiating everything in its path. Seeping condensation halted the workings of every industrial piece of machinery world-wide. Sheets of rain plummeted down from the sky with enough force to dent roofs. Heat froze the world, but it was nothing compared to what was to come.
She bawled and bled herself dry. The morning the water stopped and the sun came out for the first time in 17 weeks was a relief. Waters receded, buildings emerged, and fields were resuscitated. The morning after, her fever rose another degree. Slowly but surely in a near perfect Fibonacci sequence, seasonal highs and lows melted into monotone heat. Fanatics – hands held towards the heavens – shrieked deity’s vengeance. Scientists pointed gravely to blood-red lined graphs.
She was shriveling up. Our skin wilted and dried, we aged 20 years in 20 days. Sand free of its hydrated bonds raged and blew around her with renewed fury. Earth cracked and blistered. Cloud and rain forests lost their leaves, inhabitants drowned in the absence of oxygen. Winds searching for moisture pounded relentlessly on the sides of buildings and flash fires consumed the few trees who had previously withstood the drought. Skeletal remains of everything from birds to abandoned vehicles lay calmly and ominously on the streets like ash. The word precipitation became extinct.
Shaking in fury and fatigue during her final days, Mother Earth’s seizures caused earthquakes and simultaneous eruption of volcanoes worldwide. Having first exploded her insides out through these volcanoes, she finished by imploding herself and her captors. It was on that final day that the last few realized the truth. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
