To the Well-Organized Mind

Chapter One

We abuse best in the name of love.

What else do you feel comfortable manipulating and taking for granted than that which you love? And when your lover cannot cry or fight back, well, then the abuse doesn't even feel like abuse.

This is how we killed Mother Earth.

And this is how She killed us in return:

Nature has told us time and again through natural history that when the world can no longer sustain its populations, some sort of calamity befalls in order to restore the balance. Humanity put it off for a long time: genetically modifying food to feed the masses, creating medication to battle diseases and aging, building shelters against damaging storms and weather.

But that just made the inevitable that much more climatic when it finally happened.

Mass suicide: suicide via ignorance and comfort, aka climate change. And one other thing:

Feralism.

-Taken from Ridge's scattered papers

*

Ridge's history lessons ricochet through my brain as I trudge onward. Always forward. I can't turn around, not yet.

Nothing in the landscape or environment can distract me from my mind. Nothing in the landscape is alive besides me.

When the acid rain begins to drizzle, I hardly flinch.

It burns, burns worse than walking barefoot over sun-roasted sand, and I almost wish it would just burn straight through, bullet holes of swift yellow death. This slow aching death called survival is the greatest bout of masochism we humans have yet crowned ourselves with.

*

Burning rain changes to burning earth and burning air. Every inhalation dries my lungs until they are crusty sponges filled with grit and sand. Sometimes I'm unsure if I'm searching for anything or just trying to commit the slowest suicide in all history.

I scour the landscape for any mirage of a tree. But I don't even have false hope to encourage me. Just barren land all around me, the Rocky Mountain Desert. Or the Amazon Desert. Or the Madrid Desert. I could be anywhere; I'm sure this sight would be waiting for me there.

I should admit it by now: the Barrens have no end.

*

How many days have I been stumbling forward? I'm going mad, going to start naming the individual clumps of roasted clay soon.

There is a beauty in everything if you know how to look, even if just the placement of splattered indents beaten into the mud. Ridge always tried to make me more optimistic. Even if he were hacking out the last droplets of his blood and bits of black lung onto the dirt, still he would try to point out what a beautiful Rorschach flashcard it would make.

"Ridge..." I croak. I can't remember the last time I spoke aloud.

Ridge also always wrote of the end of civilization as if there would be another civilization afterwards to care what had happened before. 

My feet stumble in the dry cracks riddling the earth, punishment for wasting my breath, for wasting my thoughts, for still thinking anything might turn out better.

*

When I reach an oasis—shelter—open grave, no one is as surprised as I am.

My feet stop walking, and it takes my eyes and mind several more seconds to realize why: a body is lying in my path. A human. A person. Blinking, I look up and see the piles of people. They lie haphazardly in every direction, arms flung up over faces, mouths gaping open, flies landing on still noses and still hands.

I haven't seen humans in more than a month wandering. Or, I should say, I haven't seen living, speaking people.

Then again...I give a feeble kick at the one in front of me. The shallow pockets of inhaled air reek. These people are probably corpses, slowly withering away in the heat. Piles of leather.

I was aiming for the body's head, but my balance is off after days of dehydration, and I wind up tripping over the shoulder instead, flailing arms failing to save my footing. I thud atop the body, and I think how fitting it is, to add one more corpse to the pile.

Then there is a groan. I realize the body I lie atop is moving up and down, ever so slightly, but rhythmically nonetheless. It breathes.

"I made it," I whisper. Or I think I whisper it. My throat has no liquid left, so I probably only think it. If these people are here, they must have come from beyond the Barrens.

The Barrens must end after all.

With the last of my strength, I heave myself onto my elbows, unable to maneuver in a way that keeps them from digging into the torso of the person beneath me. I try to look beyond this collection of bodies. Could the end be a scant twenty paces away? But my eyes are blurry and can't see anything in the distance beyond more Barrens.

The corpses stir—no, people are waking and sitting up and murmuring. The person I lie on has the most amazing liquid brown eyes, and they are focusing on me. My strength fails me. Collapsing back onto the body, eyes drifting shut, I press my cheek into the dearest of lullabies: a beating heart.