Fool's Gold At The End Of The World

“Children who grow up with nothing don’t know what they’re missing out on.” I tried to remind myself of Kat’s words as I looked at her face reflected in our daughter. I remember how I felt when she first told me we were expecting, absolute gut-wrenching dread. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a father, I had just never imagined I could be, not in this world at least. And who was I to bring a child into a world that couldn’t sustain her? I thought it to be cruel, but Kat assured me that life always finds a way.

The change had happened gradually over decades, the earth stopped being able to provide the nutrients that a plant needed to thrive. First, the flowers died, then the trees, and then the grass. Deer came into the city in search of food, gaunt, desperate, and then they died too. Most of humanity began to wither leaving behind a desolate planet floating in the universe. Pockets of people remained to retreat underground and somehow managed to produce artificial environments that could sustain us at least a few decades more.

Allie was born before they implemented mandatory sterilization for all men. She was one of the last accidents, and the most beautiful accident I’d ever had. I remember her doll hands reaching out from the drawer we’d fashioned as her crib. My fingers looked like rough tree trunks next to her, and I felt a needle of sadness pierce into my heart as I thought about how she’d never scrape her knees climbing in a tree.

There was a food shortage 2 years ago, and we hadn’t all made it. Our skeletons poked through our taut skin and begged to be released, but Kat and I gave up our rations so that Allie could eat. This is when Kat had assured me that Allie wasn’t deprived of anything, because she didn’t know any better and we always gave her what we could. Deep down, I knew she was wrong. There were lots of things that Allie was deprived of, and I felt helpless that I’d never be able to provide her with everything that I wished she had. Kat didn’t make it through that season, and then I was alone with my deprived daughter whose mother had now been taken from her as well.

“Where are we going daddy?” Allie asked as I checked her suit to make sure it was secure. The colony was running short on food again, and I suspected another famine was on our doorstep. She was too young to understand, but I wanted to be able to give her one thing that she never had before we died.

The scavengers had returned from a mission, they often came back sullen and tired, but this time weak smiles tilted on their face. They held court in the cafeteria, where the rest of us listened to tales of their excursion.

“You didn’t really see it,” Jill, the woman who runs the laundromat said to the tall brunette scavenger with who I knew she often shared a bed. She thought he was a liar as he recanted the story of their last trip.

“I did! It was right beside the old bank coming out of the crack in the sidewalk,” he protested. “I would have picked it and brought it for you, but I didn’t want to be the asshole who killed the last flower on earth.”

I hadn’t been paying much attention, the scavengers often blew smoke over their stories to gain the interests of the others, but as he began to describe the flower, I could vividly imagine it growing in my mother’s garden. The scavenger was still quite young, maybe 20 at the oldest. He would have been quite young when the last of the greenery had died off, I wondered if we would have remembered the flower enough to be able to describe if he hadn’t just seen it with his very own eyes. Jill blushed and the Scavenger pulled her into a kiss.

Outside the cafeteria, I waited for him. I didn’t want to ask in front of his audience, but I needed to know for sure if he was telling the truth.

“As golden as the sun,” he assured me and when I asked where he saw it, he responded, “You wouldn’t be stupid enough to go out looking for it would you?”

With his directions, I now led Allie up to the dry earth. I bribed an old friend from the equipment division with half my rations for the month to get us the surface suits, and I had to have them back by the morning. I knew the flower was at least a half day’s walk, so we had to get going.

Allie was slow, slower than I expected her to be. She had never been on the surface before, so her eyes squinted at the sun that beamed down on her. I remembered sunny days where I laughed and played with friends in a field, but she looked at the sun like it was an inconvenience. She was right though, I was sure that it had gotten hotter than when I was a kid. With each step, it felt as if the rubber on the bottom of our soles would melt into the crisp and cracked asphalt beneath our feet.

“How much longer?” Allie whined, and I pictured myself in the backseat of my father’s station wagon asking the same thing as we drove to Disneyland.

“Just hold on a little more,” I begged her, “I promise when we get there it will be worth it.”

But the further we got away from the colony the more I suspected there was no flower at all. I imagined us as prospectors in the old west in search of fortune, only to stumble across a cave full of fool’s gold.

Tumbleweeds passed us as my disappointment started to settle. I could see in Allie’s face that she was tired, and I kicked myself for having pulled her out here so far away from her home. That is until I saw the ruins of the bank, it was funny to think someplace that once held such value in our society was now nothing more than a monument to the world as we knew it.

“What are we looking for?” Allie looked up at me through her suit as I pulled her to the sidewalk, inspecting every crack and crevice until I saw the sharp green leaves spilling out of a jagged break in the ground. The green leaves reached up to the sun. Flower buds roared like lions as shades of yellow, orange, and red rippled outward.

I marveled at how much the flower looked like the ones from my childhood, planted between vegetables in my mother’s garden to ward off invading slugs. If a slug had accompanied the flower, I probably would have fainted. I didn’t know exactly what the flower meant for our future, but if it could survive the conditions laid before it, maybe we would survive ours too.

“It’s so pretty,” Allie got low to inspect it, like any curious child she needed to know how it grew and why it existed, and she seemed to think the closer she put her face to it, the more it would make sense to her. “Daddy, what is it?”

I thought about my answer. It was the one thing that I never thought I’d be able to give my daughter, the thing she never missed because she didn’t know she could have it. But I knew what it was, “hope. It is hope.”