Naked Ape Party

Story by Tara MacLean

I am a mother. I live in the year 2075. I have two children. Two girls. They are smart and beautiful…I suppose most parents feel this way about their children. It is hard to see them so ill. I am mildly comforted by the fact that since asthma affects 70% of the children now, they are putting a lot of energy into research. I had it as a child, too. I couldn’t run, or play outside most summer days. Now my children don’t go outside at all. They don’t know the feeling of the sun on their faces and the sandy feet. They don’t have pockets full of shells and stones and dried, salty hair. But we play the sounds of the sea while they sit beneath the lamps . Sea gulls, rising and falling on the wind call to each other, foamy waves crest and kiss the shore. The inhale and exhale of the tides.

I remember the day they closed the Ocean. I was twelve. We had been wearing thick cream for years to protect us from the sun and had full suits so the toxic water didn’t touch our young skin. I still got rashes but I didn’t care! I loved being outside. The sea gulls had been gone long before I was born, though I saw some in the animal preservatorium on a school trip. The notice went out on the Unitele that a world wide ban on visiting the Ocean was in place, no longer safe. They were doing all they could, but after the “Rising of 2040” the water levels left millions of people homeless, the fresh water supply tainted and the pandemic that followed …well, we all know what happened then.

So we all live in commupods, under weather resistant domes because the hurricanes happen weekly. We hear them above us and wonder what the ‘exposed’ are doing to protect themselves. That is what we call them. The “exposed’. They are the people who do not have the money to afford proper shelter. We are told that many of their children are deformed now. Skin cancer takes most of them. We try to donate cream and our old sun suits to them, but everyone is short on supplies. We have our water rations and we pay dearly for them.

My children will be home from school soon. They are learning history now and they are angry. I don’t blame them. So was I when I learned what happened. How my grandparent’s generation were so greedy and thoughtless, so short sighted. I wept when I found out that they had been warned. The scientists told them they needed to change quickly or risk the destruction of our species. They didn’t listen….they carried on and wasted wasted wasted. They had to have more. Now we see that as a sickness like any addiction, but then it was acceptable..even encouraged.…and now we have almost nothing. The soil is almost dead, the Oceans are a graveyard, the air is unbreathable… We are helpless.

My daughters were born with no ovaries. This is happening more and more. The definition of a species is an organism that is able to interbreed in nature to produce a viable offspring that can further reproduce. I did not produce viable offspring that can reproduce. I do not fit the definition of a species. I fear we will soon be extinct. Maybe it is for the best.

The kids are coming in the door. I should plug in the lamps and get their oxygen room tidied up. Then we will watch the Unitele together. It is frightening me every day. Breaches in the domes where the exposed try to get in, riots at the borders, general dispair. If only we had done something then…if only we had seen the truth…if only we had listened. I will not be a grandmother so who do I have to answer to down the line…I wonder what my grandmother was thinking. If I could travel through time I would shake her and plead..wake up, Grandmother…wake up

< back to home page