"The POLLUTED"

“Sometimes the sky is white, an awful, blinding white. One I associate with paint or bleach, a dangerous white that doesn’t discriminate, just envelops. You might point out that this isn’t really the sky’s doing, it’s the clouds, but then, what’s the difference? We walk, day after day, and I feel it tugging. A hunger that can’t be satiated. How much of a cloud is the sky?”

Short story. Platypus Press: Shorts. #2.5. May 2019. 

Lately, it’s been hard for me not to think about what the world will look like in 50, or 100, or 1001 years. Climate change, or the climate crisis as some news outlets have now more aptly chosen to call it is real. We cannot escape it. There is hope. Sort of. Or else there isn’t. Or else there is just this vision of a near-catastrophic future — and this vision, I think, has begun to permeate the surface of all things. It lives underneath every conversation, every decision, every thought, always, the way death and sex do.

With this dystopian, sci-fi story, I was thinking about the possible belief systems that might emerge from a total collapse of our environmental systems, and its subsequent consequences. I was thinking about where we might start to place our hope, and how others might rebel against those very systems of hope — so in The Polluted, we have characters forsaking technology, forsaking procreation, looking for some mythological, promised land called Anon.

We also have characters whose internal realities are not so different from those of today. Characters who are lonely, sad, and afraid. Characters who, against complicated and painful backdrops, are looking to love, and be loved.

Purchase the full story here.