Bill Engleson is the Readers’ Choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning entry is decided by the popular vote and rewarded with a special feature here today. (In case of a tie, the writer who submitted an entry first is the winner per our rules.) Without further ado, here’s the winning story:
Ocean
by Bill Engleson
We came to take a final look. That was still permitted. It was hard to police as well. So many systems had broken down.
The virus had decimated the health system.
Armies of rebels, rebelling against a range of impositions they felt impeded their liberty, roamed the land protesting, laying waste.
There were some from inland who went to extraordinary measures to journey to the edge of the land to see what was still enjoyable to see. Most had never imagined that the ocean would disappear within their lifetime.
This barrage of traffic did pose additional environmental issues of course but the authorities accepted how little control they had.
And, perhaps, people were beyond caring.
Hope was a lost cause.
The news stories were clear: THE PILE IS WITHIN SIGHT-A MATTER OF DAYS-PERHAPS HOURS.
THE PILE!
An almost innocuous name.
Mountains of synthetic garbage and so much more of humanity’s leavings had been polluting, poisoning the ocean for decades. Natural disasters, escalating events of nature, angry, intensifying storm swirls, vicious funnels of destruction foaming up in the dark distant and cascading towards our fragile poorly placed settlements, has catapulted them, whole towns, and regions, into the raging and vengeful, the voracious sea.
As the sea swallowed the land, and the plastic piles poisoned the sea, as our social systems and networks frayed under the weight of societies disintegration, all we could do was pilgrimage to its edge, its diminishing brink, stare out, and lament how we had failed.
