Locked In

She hands it to him. Mother to son. Flora to Orchid. A heart shaped golden locket. Inside, the melted remains of a bit of photographic paper of his great-great-great-great grandmother, the matriarch of the family and a hero in her own right. Nana Nature, as she had fondly been deemed, had been the one stopping the bulldozer, alerting the children worldwide on live link and Tick-Tock* of the impending destruction of the world. She got up on her chair. She danced and she sang like no one had before. She danced through fires. She showered herself in flames too hot and in her fireproof green jumpsuit. She showed those children the images of the earth hundreds of years ago where there was wildlife in gardens, plants and human interaction. She brought back the real conservation that was Earth Day and with a flare which has not been matched since.

The locket locked in the past, a golden shred of life long ago. That was a time when gold could still be worn around necks. A time when gold was something of value and not a source of physical pain.

Thinking of Nana Nature, Flora grabs Orchid’s 7-year-old hand whilst she clings to the fittingly heart shaped rings of the last tree as it is nearly subsumed in the blaze. She feels the heat of the earth sear through her. The history books once taught that this was a place to be feared. This was a place called Hell. The reality, this land of fire and without peace, was brought about by human apathy, ignorance and denial.

Orchid looks up at Flora with his big dark eyes, a reminder of the lost freedom, lost souls and the lost chance to merely live. He is long past tears, a child with no ability to go out, no chance to play, no company of friends. Masked, veiled, always protected from the heat of the rays and without the company of the trees and the animals. Air conditioning kept them mostly functioning, but the earth was so damaged by then that the drops of fossil fuels left were on an inconsistent dripping pattern, much like fluids intravenously injected as had been the case in hospitals in Nana Nature’s time.

Oxygen would sputter through ventilators, but Flora had known it was her time. The gas mask fell from the ceiling and rather than put hers on before fastening her son’s, she took hers and put it on his face. With the flames encircling them, she knew there was no way the two of them would make it. She knew his chances of survival were better. He was smaller, he needed less and for shorter periods of time. Besides, the only chance humans had to survive was if Orchid mated with Elderflower, the daughter of Cowboy, off grid man.

Cowboy was the man who knew how to live in any condition. He had been to the Arctic before the ice caps vanished. He lived off the land and took care of the trees and animals whilst they were there. He taught others how to do the same and he never left the air conditioning without his hammock and cooking equipment. That was, until the palm oil ran out. See, Cowboy too, in all his wisdom, was unable to stop the decimation of the oils and he too had to start relying on the intoxication and oppression of the airconditioned tree-less, plant-less, animal-less office block spaces. He too lasted in this space for 8 hours, until he breathed his last, as he always said he would. ‘A life without trees for my hammock is life unliveable. I shall part when the last tree falls. This is my apocalypse plan’ and so he did.

Digital spaces, manmade. Abysmal existence. A toxic inconsistency whereby thoughts are conveyed through the drip, drip, dripping sound of gloved fingers on keyboards and chiming nuisances of messages received. One and then another. Another. More. More. More. Faster. Quickly. Now. Yesterday. Now. Again. Quickly. Resume faster speeds. Output is inadequate. Computer can spit it out faster. Faster. It does. It does the work. Stop. Automated. Go. Human no more. Go. Go. Go. Faster. Go. It does not end. No sleep. No breath. No distinguishing factor between night and day. It is all the same. Eternal and unyielding. Relentless.

It is in this space that immediately after the loss of his beloved mother, Orchid clings to the heart shaped locket, in a small encasing of Nana Nature’s fireproof green jumpsuit whilst staring longingly at 18-year-old Elderflower in her banana hammock shaped suit. Flora always told him that when she took her last gasp of air that he had to find a way to reach that girl, to find some common ground between the automatism so strictly enforced by the state and so desperately impeding the direction of his soul and the way of the Cowboy, too proud to ask for help but clearly radiating through the beautiful eyes of Elderflower.

Orchid slowly, carefully pulled out the photographic paper and split it in two. He gave the larger piece to Elderflower. She looked at him lovingly as she knew that this was the end. She smiled through the masks and the gowns and that over-sized cowboy hat. She knew that this last act of kindness, this last bit of photography, was to be ingested. She knew this act of love was so that if either of them survived Hell, there would be images left on the X-ray machines which would help them figure out which element it was which finally brought them to the end of the story. It was the only way that they would be able to re-create life again.

*Name has been changed to preserve the legal personality of the entity formerly known as above.