A Micro Fiction: Wings
Away to their left, a flight of cockatoos lifted from the gums and swung a pink cloud over the road and into the sun-burned bush. She watched them go, shielding her eyes and savouring the sight, knowing that was this could be the last time she ever saw a living bird.
Not two weeks later she stood upon the edge of a frothing sea. The water was no longer tepid and refreshing, but bubbled and boiled, evaporating off into steam before her eyes. Behind her, society lay in pieces, crumbled along the ravaged earth that lay stretched out behind her – like a scar upon the planet.
They were a scar, a plague that wrought destruction upon all it touched. She stood, waiting for her penance, as the world burned. Millions of years of evolution brought to it’s knees in mere moments. The steam rose, the fire raged, and she waited. She stood, ready to face it—too proud to hide frightened and cowering in pointless, useless bunkers—she was ready meet her end. The end they had brought upon themselves.
They thought, with their guns and their bombs and their nuclear warfare, that they could conquer the world. How wrong they had been. Mother Earth was still teaching them, up to the last, just how small they really were in the universe.
As the planet conquered that which strove to destroy it, she stood, breathing in the first hint of clean air in decades, and a soft smile replaced her fear. This was more true than anything she had experienced in her entire wireless, disconnected life.
A flash of a shadow overhead. She flinched, glancing up into the broiling sky, and saw wings.
Her faint smile blossomed. Here, on the last edge of the world, she could be content in knowing they hadn’t defeated everything.
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