Maysie's Galaxy ONC 2023

The world as she knew it

There was a girl who lived on a bluff off of a sinkhole, called May. Well, there were plenty of homes on this bluff's hill slope as the Loess Hills has been cut by the Missouri River. And the girl had plenty of names, but she was little, so they didn't matter to her. Maysie-May couldn't remember a time when her home was called anything other than "The Bluffs of the Sinkhole."

She had been two when the hole formed in a park off the river of the six villages of Sioux City. The Missouri River flowed into it, causing a whirlpool to form. For the second time in known history, the Missouri River also flowed backwards, attempting to fill the hole from the other side.

A week in, people started to hear about the Missouri drying up to the south of the hole. It had widened, no longer small enough to make a whirlpool. Everything simply cascaded off its edge and into the unknown, making a once mighty river into the world's largest waterfall.

Already in a drought to the East due to weather changes, the already low Mississippi lost what could account for 45%-70% of its water in roughly a month. A few deep spots became lakes. Immediate water needs were cared for, but much of a way of life was on the brink of collapse.

All Maysie knew was that Mommy wouldn't give her any more bananas, no matter how she cried for them.

Eventually, the US government had enough and started two separate projects: the great Missouri Reroute (where they dug a mile around the sinkhole), and a deep exploration of the hole. The reroute took a whole year with enough workers to double the tristate areas' population. So Maysie got her bananas back more than a year after she lost them, and by then, "the pickies" had set in and she refused to eat them because they were weird and new.

The deep exploration was a failure. The turbulence killed every helicopter down, and there wasn't enough rope in the world to safely descend it's depths-especially past the fog layer. The last anyone heard of exploration, one billionaire's son decided to make the descent on his own and was presumed dead after 6 months.

Maysie was 4, starting Pre-K with a long walk to the school. Her mother had to go with her as there was no bus system, but laws were in place to punish parents who let children walk alone. There would be helicopters flying over school routes in the early mornings with the latest idea for the massive sinkhole: it would become the final home of all the US nuclear waste. No one could reach it to use the waste to harm others. The core was already presumably radioactive. But there was no way to account for what happened to the waste, which was all sorts of environmental health violations, illegal in any nation. The US got away with it without many repercussions outside a halfhearted sanction via the UN.

The billionaire's son made it back out her first week of school. He had made it down to the granite layer, past the fog with his hand-cranked light. There was nothing for it to reflect off of until the first barrel came hurtling down from above. 1, then 20. He lost count, the bright yellow barrels slowly fell into the abyss until they became too tiny to reflect light.

That's when the young man gave up and slowly came home, narrowly missing being hit by nuclear waste, daily. Turns out he had rotated to the riverbed wall during his time down there, away from the edge they usually backed up to the hole in-probably the only reason he made it out of there, whole.

Immediately the man became a celebrity. They put videos of him up almost daily, asking him too many questions. The first one asked by a child was, "How did you poop down there?" Turns out he wore a Union Suit (footie pajamas with a butt flap).

Maysie wanted her own "onion soup" after that, so she could poop while climbing the monkey bars at school.

Her mother was appalled.

After the excitement wore off from having someone finally return from the sinkhole, people started jumping into the abyss. At first, it was 1 or 2 a week, but soon it became a torrent of thrill seekers who were tired of life. Perhaps it was a bad policy, but anyone who fell into the hole was not labeled a death at all, just a missing person. It complicated insurance claims and inheritance, but the government had messed up so many things at this point that the citizens were plain numb.

Still, no one officially blocked off the site until the day a worker was attacked by a known environmentalist, and both fell. It took the idea of someone who didn't want to fall to get a reaction from the jaded public. Vigils, protests, riots, all the things that dumping nuclear waste should have triggered finally raised its hoary head for the image of a man in a yellow reflective vest and a handlebar mustache. He was probably one of those men who got online to taunt environmentalists and vegans alike, so it was strange for the world to mourn him. He joined an ever-growing list of false martyrs: people who were the absolute worst, yet their death made the world change for the better.

Within a month, a massive wall was built around the site, with only a single ramp backing up over the hole, cantilevered. Now there were the bluffs and the wall.

Maysie didn't think much of any of this, but something about the ever-present abyss in her life was making her subconsciously nervous.

She began having dreams their house was on the edge-slope of a sinkhole, in a vast field of flowers. In that house, her parents would get in a fight, so she'd leave to go pick flowers. Not long afterward, her father would exit the house and go up out that gentle valley and come back rolling a massive boulder downhill and plug the sinkhole after crushing the house with her mother still inside.

Maysie woke up screaming most nights, and both her parents would try to calm her. In the end, the only peace they could have was letting her sleep between them.

Maysie never knew she'd come to miss that dream. Reality had something far worse in store for her little family.