A little bit of fiction. The first draft of something and I'm open to constructive crititicism.

 First off, I don't write fiction.   However it occurred to me that what I've been writing about lately is difficult to get our heads around.  Climate change is really happening in today's world, and at the risk of hyperbole, it really is end of the world type stuff.

I needed to find a way to break it down to the indivdual level.   That thinking, and some natural curiosity about the New Madrid fault line got me thinking about how easily things could go bad for a society if a series of natural disasters hit in rapid succession.   

Thanks to this writing prompt, something started to form in my head.   Please keep in mind that this is the first draft and it deals more with the themes I'm hoping to explore.   It does not have a current title.

So without wasting time...here we go.

The world, at least as most people understood it, ended on a rather ordinary Tuesday afternoon.   I remember it was a perfectly ordinary day.

Before we can talk about what we built, what we are still building, we have to go back to the very beginning and talk about the earthquake and everything else that followed in rapid succession.  Only it wasn’t that rapid, it took years of people turning their back on an overwhelmed state and federal government.  It took years of relearning how to talk to each other, years of learning to cooperate and putting aside false differences in skin tone and language; but that story is yet to come

What caused the end of the world for a majority of Americans was a combination of natural disasters, made worse by our hubris but no one expected a 7.7 earthquake along the New Madrid fault line.   America was faced with another national disaster just a few weeks later when not one but two super hurricanes made landfall; one cutting a path of destruction through the city of New Orleans and containing northward flooding the areas.

The second storm actually caused less damage but caused massive flooding that caused untold millions in agriculture losses. 

Natural disasters that upset millions of lives within weeks of each other leaving nearly 840 million people affected in some way.   That’s a huge number, and frankly it’s hard to imagine.  So imagine it was your family.  Now add to that your brothers and sisters families.  Maybe the families of your next door neighbors and the families of that girl or guy from work you liked to hang with.  Only that chain kept growing and growing.  

The quake affected everything from agriculture to communications to zoo animals.  There are still rumors of a pride of lions wandering the empty wastes of western Tennessee.  Things only got worse as the super storms came through weeks later.  What bridges didn’t collapse during the earthquake where just further damaged in the storms.   The spine of what was once America was broken.

My name is Pedro Brown and up until the end of the world I was the owner of a small business.  I didn’t make a lot of money but my family and I were happy and doing okay.  We did everything right; paid our taxes and went to church on a Sunday.  Hell, I even voted for the lesser of two evils every election.   I took my two girls, Emily and Madison, to the park up the street.   Joan, my wife worked as a nurse. 

When the screaming started and the earth, which was always solid beneath my feet rolled like waves on the ocean, I got lucky in that I was outside away from things.    My wife did not as the hospital fell in around her.  My two children were buried in the rubble of their school.   My house collapsed.      Within a matter of minutes…we had nothing.   Somehow I emerged with a broken arm; luckily my wife had taught me how to set a broken arm.   What I remember the most about that day was the screaming.   I was screaming; all the kids were screaming, parents in search of a loved one screaming……the digging with bare hands as we tried to reach those buried in the rubble.   People screaming at a phone that would not work, others screams that seamed unworldly in their grief and pain. 

Then came the days of sobbing.

Even now some 50 years later I cover my ears to make it stop, late at night when the wind blows and you can hear the voices of the dead.   Every one of us lives with a guilt that we survived and others did not.

We would learn later that over 2.5 Million of us – people just like you and me my friend – were suddenly homeless.   Over 2 million wouldn’t have clean drinking water.  Nearly 8 million people were at risk.  Somebody famous once said that the death of one man was a tragedy.  The death of a million men is a statistic.   Whoever that was is right.  You can cry only for those that you know…the rest are just numbers and our simple little human brains are not designed to understand what “millions” are.   We only understand small numbers, like family and community.  

I cannot tell you what it was like, I don’t have the worlds.   I’m not a writer but I do think it’s important to tell the story of what happened next.  That's were you come in my friend.  To write down the stories and the words and try to make sense of this.

What we did, what we built.  What we are still building.  Learn from our history, our mistakes.  Hopefully we did a few things right.

All of what occurred in the blink of the eye in the years afterward.  Because I am an old man now and not in my late 20’s anymore we have to tell this story BUT this is not my story!  This is the story of so many others that helped build a new land out of the old, which helped create a new way and a new system.   We didn’t survive the plagues and the floods and the aggression of others to not learn from history.

In the old America we never learned from history and condemned ourselves to old cycles of boom or bust and old myths of race and sex.   This, this is the beginning of the new story of America and hopefully the foundations that myself and countless others are leaving for you will matter, that they will continue…but the cost of freedom and equality will always require eternal vigilance.   It’s too easy to let a narcissistic fucker in and take power and God knows we have had our fair share try it.   

Like most things that were built from scratch…none of us had a clue of what we were doing, but we needed to do something.   This is where I suppose the story begins.

I'm in the process of sketching this out.  I have another short story in my mind that takes place in this found community.   I'll work it out and share when it's ready.