When the desert came to my doorstep I remained mostly unperturbed. What’s a little sand, I thought, and watered my garden a little more that week.
It happened slowly, mostly. Warm days and cool nights turned into hot days and cold nights, but I didn’t notice much, though I found I stayed indoors more during the day and put an extra blanket on my bed. Sand at the edge of the garden turned into sand mulched into the soil turned into just sand, and I grew succulents, dug a shallow pool, and dipped my toes while pretending I was at the beach.
I mistook the first scorpion for a beetle at first. When I found one in my bathtub I started putting lavender around the doors and windowsills, though they mostly didn’t bother me. Lizards replaced mice as household pests, and instead of the hoof prints of deer I started seeing the slither marks of snakes wending their way across the yard. I didn’t mind: company was company.
Maybe I’m slow, or just too laissez-faire. By December, when it should have been a cool 50 degrees during the day, it was still sunny and 90, and I started to worry. Not for myself, of course, I’d be fine, but what was happening to the world?
I turned on my television, connected to an old satellite a friend had hacked once upon a time (it seemed ages ago) to connect to any signal out there. As I surfed through channels I saw wars, more than I remembered, fighting over food and water, a collapse of the global economy, roving bands of brigands taking what they wanted from those few who had … anything.
The desert had spread, was everywhere, became our world.
So I did what I thought anyone in my position would do. I turned the television off and pulled the plug, refreshed the lavender in my windowsill, and went into the garden to cool my toes, waiting for the world to end.
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For more cool short fiction by myself and others, check out It’s the Water, a micro-fiction blog that Abby and I started with some friends.
