Short Dystopian Fiction with Heart Shaped Locket – By Susan Sanders

Well the world as we know it finally ended and life goes on as it always does. The cockroach is now king as everyone always suspected it always would be. It crawls peacefully over rubble and the remains of most fleshy things taking what it needs and ignoring pretty much everything else.

Steam pipes up from a sewer cover in what was Manhattan and streams of cockroaches skitter by crawling into an overturned bus. Most of the remains on the bus have turned to piles of bone now as they have been picked clean by the cockroaches. A roach smells its way up to one pile of bones, the remains of a deceased female. It sits in the overturned bus with a hand clenched at the chest as several cockroaches move about to clear meat off the remains. One of the cockroaches climbs onto a shiny object clutched in the grips of the bones. This movement causes a minor ruckus as the ligaments give and the bones collapse. The shiny object falls down opening somehow to reveal pictures of two small children, a boy and a girl. The cockroach crawls across the faces of the children, wriggles its antennae for a moment before crawling away towards some missed bits of flesh in a shoe.

Just a month ago, the world turned to fire and ash. Poisoned air exploded in the streets killing mostly everything. The cockroaches hid and survived in the tightest of spaces away from the smells, fires, and collapsing buildings. Then they began to resurface and found the world to be a feast, previously unimagined by cockroaches that can’t imagine. They don’t mind the smell of rotting meat and began to eat heartily. They ate and bred new cockroaches in the tightest spaces where they nest. At all hours of the day and night they moved about whittling on bones to collect food to make more babies.

There is no sunshine to blind them which might have made them happy if they were capable of such emotion. The sunlight has been replaced by a constant overcast which created a better environment for them to crawl everywhere. These dark skies rain black water into what remains of the sewers and this water travels out to the ocean carrying cockroaches with poor decision making skills on tiny rafts of bits and things that float. These roaches fall out of large pipes into an ocean which is blackening at the shores and spreading.

Even out here on the ocean, the cockroaches are teaming among the fishkill vying for that next morsel for the next batch of babies. They crawl over the floating objects buttressing against the shore and making nests where they can on a bit of dark dryness in a ghost ship. Any port in a storm should be the motto of remaining roaches, but it is not. A cockeyed naval destroyer is the place to be if you are a roach recently descended from a storm drain. The food here is slightly fresher and the fire below deck keeps the cockroaches warm as they do what they do best. What they do best at the moment involves evaluating the fire on board and deciding that now is the time they need to leave. A mass of cockroaches scurry off the deck and take their chances in the water swimming towards the next bit of un-submerged space as the ammunition storage in the destroyer, known as the ship’s magazine, finally catches fire and explodes sending roaches everywhere.

Cockroaches begin to crawl up the shore as others are left behind in the water in bits and pieces or on fire. Those that made it to shore begin again to search for food and a hole in the ground to call home. They continue to eat and mate and birth babies who also begin to eat and mate and birth more babies. It continues this way until there is nothing left to eat except other cockroaches, but no one cares if a cockroach dies.