Antarctican Heritage

Thud.

“What’s this, Banks.”

“Map of the world. What’s left of it, anyway. Look. There’s the megacities with hundreds of millions of people here. More of them there, at the other end. All the remaining superpowers since it all began, the melting glaciers and floods and all.” Banks pointed to various locations over the dusty old sheet spread over the table. “Where we are, Canada. Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, and Alaska.”

Clink. Clink. 

Mitch loaded ammunition into his pistol. “What about ‘em?”

Banks pointed to the very bottom end of the map. “Here. I want to get here.”

Laughter.

“You want to get to Antarctica? I always knew you were mad, but not this mad!”

“I was born there. My parents fought tooth and nail to get past its gates to give birth to me. There’s people that would kill for an Antarctican citizenship. Well, I have one. It’s my birthright.”

Mitch lit a cigar in his mouth. “You want to compete against the rest of the world for a slim chance to get into the most highly-protected safe haven for survivors? Cross tens of thousands of kilometres of sandstorm-heavy desert wasteland overridden with billions of dead corpses, thieves disguised as innocent refugees, and anarchic tribes of dangerous ravagers that’ll roast you alive on a spit for dinner? Not to mention going into the desert is highly illegal! Have you forgotten?”

His cigar smoke plumed into the air like the slow-moving clouds of a volcanic eruption. The image highly irritated Banks, who shuddered at the idea since he just experienced one last Tuesday, and he shooed the poisonous gas out of his face. “Stop that, Mitch. You know cigars are highly illegal, too. The smoke and all.”

Mitch laughed like a donkey and swayed as if he was on a see-saw. “Says you!”

Okay. So Banks occasionally brushed his teeth with the faucet on, which could get you punished. Big deal. He also drove a car sometimes, littered, used lights during restricted hours, and didn’t pull his weight at all in tree-planting. All of which could get you executed. He also frequently hunted extremely endangered animals, which would get him executed and have his dead body be used as fertilizer. But these laws were rarely enforced due to the current state of chaos of the world. The government could claim every citizen was strenuously scrutinized for their carbon footprint, but Banks didn’t believe it one bit. All he had to do was stay out of the radar and not get caught.

Mitch drew his knife and began to sharpen it with a stone he had picked up from the ground earlier. The screeching bothered Banks’s ears. “Why do you want to go there now alluva sudden anyway? I mean, life here sucks, but we’re doing fine, ain’t we?”

“Because I’ve been saving up money, stashing reserves of food, and gathering weapons. I think I’m ready. I don’t have time to waste.”

“So you’re going now, eh? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn ya. Make sure you have everything. Extra ammo, bandages. Even a pouch of pixie dust for emergencies! You never know when you’ll need it.” Then, rather unceremoniously, without a glance, he said, “Goodbye, old friend.”

“Goodbye,” said Banks with the same emotionless manner.

#

He was to follow the coast of the ocean to stay on track. But he didn’t leave right away. He was there for a while, standing low with knees tucked in to his chest so he was sitting but standing at the same time, right at the edge of the water. The waves switched from inward to receding like clockwork, back and forth hypnotically and soothing. The air smelled of salt and brim, windy air, and hideous dead whale and fish carcasses that piled up along the shore. The day was cold but felt warm, and the horizon was grey and bleak even if it was the afternoon. 

He didn’t leave right away because this was the only thing that soothed him enough to forget his role in the war. Leaving Mitch, who had been his belligerent partner in those days, would help a lot, too. But the beach wasn’t always peaceful. He recalled one time some idiots were nearby a couple dozen metres away. They looked like teenagers, and they were lighting some fireworks in the sand. They were laughing and having a good time. He was oblivious to their presence, minding his own business, watching the water. Until the pops went off.

Fizz. Hiss. Boom. 

Crackle. Whoosh. Bang.

Immediately like a switch turned on in his brain he went into a bloodlust drive. His eyes turned wild and his mind went feral as he searched for people to kill. When his eyes caught the teenagers he drew his homemade shiv and sprinted at them with murderous rage. At first, they found the sight of him coming at them funny and began laughing, until they watched as he pulled out his loaded pistol as well. The revelation of the weapon changed their mood instantly. They screamed and abandoned their station as they all went separate directions. He had tired out on his way to them and began coughing like tar was in his lungs, collapsing to the ground. He thought: Never again, never again. He would try to control it better in the future. He would get out of this one day.

#

His map was severely outdated. The ocean coast he was to follow was so far inland, he had to guess where he was in North America. But he knew, at the very least, that his city was Toronto, so the coast he was following was that of the Atlantic. Its level had risen so much it had swallowed entire cities. He had heard stories from other people that some brave looters dove deep to scavenge the ruins of them. They were almost as interesting as the stories of the outlaws and dangerous animals that adapted to survive in the extreme heat of the scorching desert, which was most of the Earth now. Scavenging for food in temperatures reaching above forty degrees celsius, fighting creatures with poisons and venoms so strong a drop could kill an entire town of people, just to decrease the amount of work they had to do to catch prey in the sweltering sun.

He had to keep up his tattered brown cloth hood over his head ever since the ozone layer was destroyed. He knew some people that died from the UV rays. The clothes he wore, the pistol in his holster, the rifle on his back, the shiv in his pocket, the backpack full of essentials, and the wagon he pulled along filled with ammo, canned goods, and skinned game were the only things he had. 

As of now he trudged it along a wet and cracked pavement road through the city. Abandoned cars, overgrown weeds, broken windows. Rats and pigeons. Rarely any people, but not none. A man on the street watched him throw the wrapper of a granola bar he had finished eating that he got from his food wagon.

“Hey, you young mister, don’t you know--”

“It’s illegal, I know.”

“Get out of here. We don’t want people like you in our city.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He ignored the man and moved on. He was one person. There was no way his actions could drive the world to apocalyptic ecological disaster more than it already was. So he littered all he wanted, and he didn’t care at all.

#

“Bloody hell.”

The tree monster was enormous, the size of an elephant. It had risen from the ground of its hiding spot, revealing its full height as dirt fell off its shoulders. It was a golem made of roots and leaves, eyes glowing yellow. Almost spherical in body shape, with its back a massive hump over his head like a hunchback, its arms thick and hanging, bigger than its legs, fists clenched and big like one of those #1 fan gloves people wore to sports games. It exerted a wide stance and slammed the ground full of dead fallen leaves, roaring as they floated fleetingly in the air.

Banks didn’t waste a second. He grabbed the rifle on his back and began blasting the monster. It covered its face as sparks flew, shaving bark and leaf off its body, branches and twigs flying in every direction. When he emptied his entire clip, the tree monster recovered quickly and slammed his fist down on him lightning fast. But still he was faster, his combat instincts kicking in from the war. He leaped overhead the tree monster, covering five metres of height with a single bound, and drew his pistol to continue the barrage upside down in the air, aiming for the tree monster’s face and eyes.

Roar!

“Ha! Take that!”

His clip emptied when he landed on the ground behind it. The tree monster didn’t hesitate to turn around, facing him. He cussed.

No time to reload. The tree monster backhand-swiped at him and he was forced to duck under it with no time to spare. He dropped both his guns into the leaf piles around them and drew his shiv, running up right under the beast and slashing its legs. It twisted and spun, looking for him, but he was too quick, like a nimble rat escaping a cook with a rolling pin. 

The tree monster eventually predicted his movement. With a giant slap, he knocked Banks away and sent him flying. His back slammed against a tree as it shuddered and donated some of its leaves to the ground. He landed on the ground with a thud and felt his face bleeding. Some splinters were etched into his cheek from the attack.

“You’re a feisty one, eh? I’ma blow your guts to smithereens. C’mere!”

Roar!

Banks felt around the pockets of his cloak. As he expected. He had one grenade left, and he gripped its roundness tightly. He had stolen it from a bandit who had tried to rob him days earlier. He hadn’t wanted to use it at all costs, but it was clear to him that the tree monster would not die to his bullets or shiv. 

“C’mere!”

The tree monster gladly pursued as he pulled the pin and tossed the grenade right under its feet. It only had a second to register that something was below him until it blew, painting the forest all around them with its bark limbs and wooden guts.

Boom. Splat.

“Take that, Mother Nature,” said Banks, grinning stupidly as he stood and spat on the forest floor. Then he felt a tinge of regret when he realized she really had, in fact, taken it. Years ago on a grander scale, at least.

#

After the tree monster incident, Banks vowed to steer clear of the forest. To try to stay on the beach as much as possible. He told this to the stranger he was sharing a campfire with at the beach now, in the dark of the starless night. A random stranger who decided one campfire was better than two, considering what the smoke would do to the air, if they were going to both settle in the same place for the evening anyway.

He was an old man with long, dark hair, woven and braided intricately. Two seagull feathers were sticking in it providing some sort of decoration. He was missing a couple of teeth and smelled of alcohol and smoke. His face was lightly wrinkled, giving definition to his face, making him look wise, in a sense.

“Smart decision to stay away from the woods,” he said, after Banks finished explaining himself, “the old nature spirits are not too happy with us right now.”

“What does it matter anyway, old man. Past has happened already. Can’t they learn to just deal with it? I seriously almost had my head popped off its shoulder sockets trying to cross the forest.”

“Why did you kill it? You were the one trespassing its territory.”

“I killed it to survive. What do you know about surviving, old man. You look like you’re going to die next week. You want some pigeon I hunted? I can roast one for you on the fire now.”

“No thank you. I hunt on my own as well.”

“Suit yourself.”

Crunch.

Banks bit into his own roasted pigeon on a stick, enjoying the view of the ocean once more. “What do you think about all this, old man? About what’s been happening lately?”

“Not too much.”

“Not too much?”

“Not too much.”

Silence.

“You ever get sick of the fish the government’s selling to us? It’s all they can feed us these days. You know, with all the farmlands being destroyed by storms and disasters and all. That’s why I don’t hesitate to stab a squirrel when I see one. I could use a little change in my diet every once in a while.”

“No, I don’t get tired of fish.”

Silence.

“What about the laws, huh? You ever get tired of the laws? I mean, why can’t I brush my teeth with the faucet on without getting the death penalty? Is it really gonna affect the world all that much? Seems like malarkey to me.”

“You, stranger, do not seem to have much respect for the planet you plant your feet on every day.”

“Yeah? Tell me something I don’t know, old man. Well, teach me all about it, then. Why should I care?”

The old man leaned in forward. “My grandfather used to tell me, ‘We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.’”

“Well, I don’t plan on having any children.”

“Neither did I at your age.”

Silence.

“How’s your grandfather?”

“Dead.”

“Oh.”

More silence.

“He borrowed my Earth,” said the old man, “he gave it back clean and nice. I respect him for that. I wish I could do the same for my children, but ah, well, here we are.”

“It’s not your fault. I’d say other people of your time stole it from your children. They didn’t ask permission from them or you at all. So why care so much?”

“Because I let them steal it from my children. I stood by.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

The old man, with a twirl of his wrist, produced a small, sparky white wisp in his hand. A conjurer, Banks thought with awe. What was he doing? The wisp transformed and burned in his palm. Combustion fuel for the fire, Banks thought, realizing too late. He cussed. Before he could stop the old man, he threw the wisp into the dying campfire and it burst into flame, crackling ten times louder.

Crackle. Snap. Whoosh.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Banks grimaced and threw himself onto the ground, hands behind his head face-first into the dirt in an instant. His heart received the same electric shock of a defibrillator, his skin turned rigid, and his joints were padlocked and the keys were thrown out the window. He shuddered as if he was in a freezer, muttering prayers under his breath. Please, please, please, God. Let me survive. Let me survive. The old man watched him with pity. A moment passed. Once the campfire flame died down, Banks slowly raised his head, filled with relief at the sign of no threat.

“So you fought in the war,” grumbled the old man matter-of-factly, sounding as indifferent as a stone.

“No concern from you, old man?”

“Well, did the human race feel concern for her as they pumped the oil out of her skin? I find it hard to have concern for anyone still alive these days.”

“They sure weren’t indignant for her when the fires and tsunamis came.”

“All the same, you see, all the same.”

Silence. Longer this time.

“Did they implant any enhancements into you for the war?”

“A couple. It’s how I was able to defeat the tree monster.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Why you asking, old man? Of course it did. Like hell.”

The old man squinted at the word. “Are you sure you can say that?”

“Shut up.”

The old man sighed. 

Silence.

“There was a fish,” said the old man, in the mood to tell a story, “that lived in the ocean with all his other fish friends. The ocean got dirty sometimes from all the seaweed and marine snow, so this fish would clean. But he would only clean his sector, his territory, at the disapproval of the others. The other fish called him selfish for doing so, saying the whole ocean was their home, and that he should clean it all. Despite, well, them not helping him with the cleaning at all. But it turned out that the ocean currents pushed the cleanliness everywhere, and what all the other fish didn’t know was that when that one fish would clean, he already was cleaning the whole ocean.”

Silence. 

“Old man.”

“Yes?”

“I feel like I’m talking to an idiot. That story made no sense at all.” He kicked a pebble in the sand. “You’re crazy. I hope you know that.”

“I am going to sleep.”

“I’m going to watch the water for a bit longer. It calms me. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Silence.

#

Ahead of him stretched the soft, cold watery plane. Smooth as a blanket. Against a bed of sky the colour of ash yet a bright residue coming from behind it like it was all a lampshade. The ocean soothed him and sure enough, he forgot all about his troubles when he watched the waves go back and forth with that same poised, endless tranquility of all time.

Slosh. Whoosh. 

You’re safe, it seemed to say. But that didn’t mean he was in safety. It had been two weeks since he had started his trek to Antarctica and he was nowhere near even across his city, let alone country or continent. It was the same old skyscrapers against a backdrop edge of ocean scenery, the tide low and receded on this fine, cold day. One of the last few places on the planet that could still get cold, really. 

He was alone as he watched the waves. The tide was lower than ever. He began to think perhaps his journey was a colossal waste of time. Antarctica was a fairyland full of dreamless punks, it was as unreachable as it was utopian. It was a fantasy, that was all. He considered his options, at conflict with himself if he should still continue his way there. Maybe getting eaten by a desert ravager tribe was still better than being stuck here. Trading one wasteland for another.

Slosh. Splash.

That was strange. The tide really was unusually low today. Enough to raise concern.

Plish. Plash. 

Panic swelled in his lungs. His eyes went teary like they were being burned by a hot gas. He got up and began searching for a car. Anything to get him away from here as fast as possible. He had to move now.

The onset of dread and fear began to crawl its way up his spine. He found a car by the side of a road near the beach. A corpse was inside, still in the driver’s seat. The only passenger. He smashed open the window and unlocked the door. He threw the dead driver to the ground and discerned his surroundings in the driver’s seat. The key was still in there. The tank had not run dry. With enough attempts he could start this car.

He got on that right away. Soon there would be sirens. He had to get a head-start before all these people would be in a panic. He thought about warning them but then went against it. The well-being of others was not his concern. The same philosophy those that walked the Earth before him carried, he ascertained. Better to follow it as well. Everyone for themselves.

When he got the car to work he booked it, speeding away from the coast as fast as it could possibly go, swerving cars with corpses in them and cracks in the road like a madman escaping the fear of what was coming. 

#

The doors were closing. Banks watched her beg indigently.

“Please! Take me instead of the child! Please!”

The guards were closing the doors fast. There were many of these beggars, trying to claw their way in like parasites, pleading till death came. The sirens were wailing all across the city like weeping, haunting ghosts, harbingers of abysmal disaster. They chilled Banks to the bone.

“Please!”

He saw in her eyes a deep hunger for anything, fiery and malnourished for a slice of equity she did not deserve. He shuddered, disturbed at its horror.

“Take me instead of her! Please!”

Her little girl was in a pink raincoat and pink boots, holding the hands of one of the guards, cowering behind his leg. She could not have been older than three. Her eyes gleamed like the shiny surface of the moon as she stared at her mother outside the closing doors in silent and innocent unknowing.

“Please! I beg you! Take me instead of my child! I don’t want to die!”

“Sorry ma’am. Children only,” said the guard, gently easing her out of the way of the closing doors of the tsunami bunker as he, along with others, locked it tight in front of them. When they were fully closed, he seemed to be speaking to an entire kind of people when he said, “You disgust me.”

#

“Are you okay?”

Banks was silent.

“Hey,” said a guard. “Are you okay? We’ve got a lot of children in here. We’re doing a roll call. What’s your name?”

He could not get that image out of his head. She was sentenced to doom instead of her child. Yet, what else in the world would make a mother happier? He shivered in his cloak, pondering the implications of that wretched woman, in terror from the darkness of a human heart he never knew could exist.

“Hey! I said what’s your name?”

“Banks,” he said finally.

“Are you cold, Banks?”

“No.”

“Then why are you shaking so much?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“We’ve got a lot of children in this bunker. This bunker was designed by the government to specifically protect you from a tsunami. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe here. We have food, water, and supplies to last us for days. But that’s the worst case scenario, usually the water will recede good enough for choppers to pick us up the next day. Hey, are you okay?”

His shivering was uncontrollable now. His eyes were on the little girl in the pink raincoat and pink boots. A nurse was on one knee, checking her eyes with a flashlight and heartbeat with a stethoscope. “All clear!” she yelled when she finished. The little girl, oblivious to what had happened earlier, asked her, “Where’s Mama?” The nurse knelt down again and quietly explained to her in a soft voice. “The government wants to protect all the children first and foremost. We want you to be safe above everyone else.” When the little girl began to cry she pulled her close into her arms to comfort her.

Take me instead of her! Please!

“Hey, Banks!” said the guard, getting a little impatient. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

He flinched. “Yeah.”

“Good. As I said, we’re doing a roll call. We need everyone’s ages. How old are you?”

“Ten,” said Banks, wiping snot from a runny nose as he looked up at the towering officer.

#

He realized he was never meant to reach Antarctica. It wasn’t just a simple dream. It was a sign of something more selfish and he never should have desired to go there in the first place. It was never his home. It didn’t matter if he had a citizenship to get in that paradise. It didn’t matter if it had luxury homes and farms and melted glacial freshwater to last them millennia. It didn’t matter if it was the last place on the planet that was a fully protected society from the horrors of the outside world, isolated and calm in the middle of the Southern Ocean.

He picked up another littered soda cup. Another plastic wrapper. His feet in the sand amidst a collection of trinkets and trash as far as the eye could see, tainting the beach and the waves. 

Further in his mind, as he picked up the trash with his gloved hands and placed it in a black garbage bag, he thought about his heritage. It was true that his parents fought like lions to get themselves across the border and have him be born in Antarctica. He was Antarctican, full-blooded, pure and through. They aimed to give him the best possible future, and even though they eventually discovered the illegal actions of his parents and found a way to deport him from the nation, he would keep that citizenship for the rest of his life. But deep down, he knew, after thinking and deciding for days, that it wasn’t his heritage. 

Another wrapper. Some diapers. A milk carton. All straight into the garbage bag. What would he do about these car tires?

He was an Antarctican, but he wasn’t Antarctic. No, he only held a special title created by and only in the minds of humans. He could not explain to the tree monster that he slayed that he was an Antarctican. That wasn’t his heritage at all. As he collected the trash on the beach for the rest of the afternoon, bleeding into the evening, he came to a decision that it wasn’t fair to call Antarctica his home when there were beaches like these in cities around the entire world that needed to be cleaned to be as perfect as Antarctica. He decided what his real heritage was.

Some pieces of glass. Probably a broken mug. Paper. Even more plastic. Into the bag they went.

His mother and father may have died trying to get him there, but they were wrong. In his eyes they were no different than the mother from the tsunami bunker wishing to switch places with her child, wishing to survive instead of her own infant. Selfish and reckless and projecting a human plague of dark insecurity. His parents were foolish to go all about sacrificing everything to reach for a home when they already had one. They were blinded and instead they should have shown compassion and charity for the home they already had. His heritage was human, he decided.

Earth was his home. He was going to clean every beach to fix it, if he had to.

#

On one warm, hideous-smelling evening he was carrying on with his beach litter cleaning business as usual when something peculiar happened. The stench of the saline water mixed with the marine wildlife carcasses and trash attacked his nostrils as toxins like a siege on a castle. He was unraveling a giant seine net, corners stuck in various sharp things like a thrown-away table and metal beams, when a squirrel came up to him in the most relaxed and casual way, coming out of the deep grass that began inland where the sand ended. 

It scurried up pieces of a garbage pile until it stood at the top of a cinderblock, facing him. Its little hands were permanently together as if it was holding something, but no acorn of sorts could be seen in them. Banks thought perhaps it was hungry. He had stopped what he was doing to acknowledge the cute fella.

His first thought, due to habitual instinct, was to take his shiv and stab it with a speedy arm. His arm twitched at the idea. But then he recoiled at the thought and abstained from the deadly action. It was an instinct of the past, he decided. He searched his backpack, rummaging through its contents to find any food he could give the animal. Bottled water, matches, a pocket knife, a compass--there. A small packet of butter cookies he had taken from the stash of a convenience store two days earlier. Hours after the tsunami. He couldn’t help himself, from experience he knew it was a prime time to steal.

But perhaps he’d stop stealing altogether too. He didn’t know. All he knew was that he wanted to give the squirrel a cookie. It didn’t look too malnourished, or desperate in the slightest, but he knew giving it food could go a long way. He’d seen enough “Don’t feed the wildlife” signs in his life and he decided he was going to ignore the rest he’d see in the future. 

He thought about how he had to quietly escape the government after the tsunami receded and the bunker doors opened. There was no way they were going to take him to another shelter or orphanage camp. He had had enough of those places, and besides, he was only going to find a way to escape again if he had gone there. He liked life better living off the land and scraping by for himself. Well, along with Mitch too, before he left him.

Shaking his thoughts, his eyes focused on the animal in front of him once more. He gave it a cookie. It froze, observing it first. Then it grabbed it with a reflex Banks could only dream of and began nibbling on it, ravenously like it had not eaten in days. As if a timer was ticking down until all the food in the world, including its cookie, would disappear.

“Good boy,” said Banks. “Hope you enjoy it. It’s pecan-flavoured. I think? Not the same as the nut itself, but I’m sure it’ll remind you of it all the same.”

The squirrel stared back with soulless black eyes. Its tail twitched and tilted.

“Hey boy, why are you picking up all that?”

Banks turned to see a man at the edge of the beach. The man’s gaze was set on the garbage bag beside him. He must have inferred what Banks was doing. 

He turned his head to look back at the squirrel, but it was already gone. The man’s voice had scared it away. 

He looked back at the man, who was still at the edge as if Banks was an oddity he did not want to come closer to. And it was quite the distance.

“What?” yelled Banks.

“I said, why are you trying to pick up all the trash! It’s a hopeless job for one kid like you. Plus, no need to! Planet’s screwed already!”

Banks paused, inhaling. He let the words of the man hang in the air for a small moment. Then he said, “Yeah, it is.” He ceased his inaction and continued on, picking up litter and placing it into his garbage bag.

“So why you still doing it?”

“Huh? Yell louder, sir!”

“I said why you still doing it!”

The boy shrugged. “I saw true selfishness, sir! Sight wasn’t pleasant at all, I never wanna see it again.”

“Yeah?”

“And as ridiculous as it sounds, I like the ocean, sir! I like watching the waves! I need to clear the view, make her pretty and all, like she used to be!”

He continued picking things up unapologetically. The man in the distance shrugged as well and said, “Well, I don’t know what you’re on kid, but you continue what you’re doing! Good luck!”

“Thank you, sir!”

The man left as Banks worked like a machine indifferent to the interaction. The words held empty meaning. Him and the man’s.

#

He wondered when it all went wrong. He had wondered since the beginning of the catastrophe. Way before the floods, the fires, the hurricanes and the earthquakes. Way before the forest spirits and fairies, golems and pixies woke and began destroying all human life in their sight. He realized none of it mattered; it didn’t go wrong when the first oil company started business, it didn’t go wrong when the first billionaire began using their private jet for five minute flights when it could be done in a half-hour car drive. Nor did it begin when people began wasting food or brushing their teeth while the faucet stayed on. He learned that it began when no one cared.

I’ll choose to care, he thought. So he spent time and effort planting a tree.

In the following days he toiled in his garden near the beach, patting dirt around the sapling and watering it with a can as much as he thought it needed. He was no expert, but he swore he would get this done. Gone were the days where he didn’t care. Like everyone else. He would never use a car again. He would never have someone tell him to stop littering. 

The sapling was cute. It was silent and innocent, unmoving, like the little girl in the pink raincoat and pink boots.

“Take the tree instead of me,” he said to no one in particular. “Please.” Then he thought about the old man he had met at the campfire, who he never got the name of, which he now regretted. “It’s for my children,” he said.

Children? 

Mitch’s voice appeared in his head. He invited it in. 

Yeah, Mitch. I plan to have children.

Ain’t no way. Who are you?

Same old me.

They’re not gonna be yours, will they?

Does it matter?

Whaddya mean does it matter? You’re crazy! You’re gonna adopt some rando’s kid?

Not adopt.

So they’re not gonna be yours, and they’re not gonna be someone else’s. What children are you even talking about?

You’d never get it, if I tried to explain.

You can’t be a father. You got issues. 

Yeah? What?

How are you going to get rid of your PTSD?

I’m going to have children. And they’re not going to have it.

But how will that cure you?

Because they’re never going to know what war is. That’s how.

So, them not having the problem is going to take it away from you?

Nah. Them not having the problem is gonna make me happy. I’m gonna tell them that I’d rather let the stress from the world hurt me than them. As long as they live, I’m good.

You make no sense.

Hell if I do.

Then he imagined that Mitch would light a cigar and put it in his mouth. He would scold him that those things could not possibly be good for an eleven-year-old. Mitch would shrug, say air pollution, UV rays, and tsunamis weren’t either, and then he’d laugh.

As he worked on planting the tree, a couple of people passed by and watched him for a while. They would until each one of them, without fail, would say, “What’s a child like you doing out here planting trees? You think you’re doing the world some sorta service, buddy? You think you’re some sorta hero? What, are you decorating your little garden by the beachfront for yourself? Selfish prick.”

Mitch too. Banks would think, Yeah, yeah, Mitch. I know what you’ll say. What the? Why are you planting trees alluva sudden?

He ignored all their voices. He continued to pat the dirt around the sapling like a pet, taking good care of it, organizing the space around it and giving it plenty of water, as well as what sunlight was left that sifted thought the grey, ashy clouds. He promised that it would survive. They didn’t see, did they? No, they didn’t. They didn’t see that he was spreading the cleanliness for all the fish in the ocean.

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