kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"SmallChanges"

words

The nights are getting colder. It's a gradual process. I'm probably not going to live to see the end of it. My kids wouldn't see the end of it, if I'd had any. We'd meant to, but something always came up. We needed to save more money for their preschool, then we needed a new car, then we needed to save money for their college. Well, there wasn't any chance now. Rene was probably cleaned up with the rest of the world.

War of the worlds couldn't have been any stranger. Maybe it was more of a 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' thing. I mean, it's got to be aliens. I don't know anything for sure, but, it's got to be aliens. The first sign of anything being out of the ordinary was the air-raid sirens. I'd heard them every so often, but just for testing. This time they just kept blaring on and on. I'd been visiting my grandfather who had a bomb shelter tucked away from the fifties. It wasn't anything special. But it was stocked with good things like canned food, first aid stuff, and best of all, oxygen.

My grandfather had been afraid that radiation could waft along on the air, so he'd made extra certain that he'd have a couple weeks of oxygen. A couple weeks underground, and the world would be a bright, chipper place again. The fifties were naive in so many ways. Then again, we got caught pretty off guard in the nineties.

It wasn't a war. There was no fighting back. Clean, cold extermination. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is slowly filling up with helium, and god knows what else. I peek outside occasionally. It's an interesting trade-off. I want to learn as much as I can about what's happening before I die. Call it my need-to-know. But the more I go up and look around, the more oxygen I lose to the atmosphere. On the other hand, if I stay down here until the oxygen runs out then I'm not going to learn anything, anyway.

Like I was saying, though, it was just extermination. All the animals are being killed off. All the plant life is being killed off. The rocks haven't been touched, as far as I can tell. The nights are getting colder. It's a gradual process. I think we're being terraformed. It's going to take a while. I'm not going to live through the end. When the aliens finally land, it will be a different world that greets them and their civilization. I wonder if it's all a big mistake. Maybe they didn't realize there was sentience on the planet. Hell, maybe they didn't even recognize life. Who knows what sorts of beings they are. I wonder if they'll ever know what they've done.