I had a dream of a tiny world, where climate change was nothing but tiny men chipping away at ponderous ivory glaciers with tiny ice-axes. These men rested only at night and in winters, but would return with terrifying numbers and collective force the following day or season. After a little while, and after realizing the monumental nature of their task, they formed a labor union. Year in and out, tiny men from the most sprawling of cities to the smallest minutia of rural towns, gathered here at the base. They even drafted their tiny wives and tiny children to pick up the tools. Tiny women, equipped with anything from tiny house keys to tiny snow shovels to tiny cooking spatulas fronted the effort, chiseling away laboriously at the milky face. Tiny children, unfazed by the expanse of their object, laughed as they skipped to and fro, all the while jabbing their tiny metal lunch utensils into the share. Oddly enough, they didn’t need to wear coats — the air warmed just so gradually as they toiled alongside their parents.
Each and every one of these tiny people worked heads-down, fixated… so focused that they hardly noticed the torrents of a liquid clear rushing forth from gaping holes. And if they did, the liquid clear was all the more useful for drinking and hydropower. And so they continued, so feverishly industrious too that they hardly noticed the first casualties, the first victims. They only believed, as they had never believed before, in the insurmountable task at hand. They built tiny boats, tiny ladders, tiny trains, tiny helicopters to help them. Some even established makeshift villages. The tiny families continued. Generations passed. More tiny men, tiny women, and tiny children disappeared quietly, vanishing into the current. All drowned so silently and individually, the neighbors never noticed.
At some point many years later, the few tiny families left — descendants of the long-ago tiny men with tiny chisels — looked up and all around. They saw. All they had ever known balanced on a thin ivory sliver, a splintering drift of dirty and broken glass. Liquid clear lapped at the edges, softly encroaching. Work done, they leapt, haggardly, into the abyss.
~ Day 131 ~
A (Musing) Cat 