Authored: August 24, 2023

Tracing your parched lips with a cloth of cold water, looking down at you. All around us, the fallen many succumbed to the unyielding heat. This was the "great march" of the first climate refugees. Borders meant very little now as famine and water shortages drove whole populations on the move.

I felt the last of your energy drain from your eyes. The heat of a parched ground, hungry for rain. But the last rains fell long ago. The air was getting thicker and thicker as the atmosphere changed. "I'm sorry," hoarsely I whispered.

Now in the flesh wounds of the present, people waving money, hoping for one more gulp of liquid water. Something in my mind flittered in, "there'll come a day when humanity will realise they cannot eat money,". That day was now.

Leaning down, I felt you take your last breath, and I held your lifeless body against mine. With fingers shaking and gaunt, I closed your unseeing eyes.

Looking up I saw the sphere of the Sun, burning orange and bright. I heard the yells of the last men around me asking for God to come and save Humanity. But silence prevailed.

So, I took from you a strand of your brunette hair and placed you down on hot ground. Shakily I stood up and I felt the heat wash over me.

This denouement, in the wake of memories the size of giants. For a brief moment, I wondered if your soul would escape this unremorseful hell that we had created for us.