The Last Beach

• Jon Maskell, Grade 11, Downlands Sacred Heart College
• Short Story
• 2001

Finalist in the 'Zapped! 2001' competition

Some call this time 5000 CE. Others call it the Year of the Tiger, whatever a tiger is. I call it the Era of Pain.
But it is not human pain, though that abounds, but the pain of Earth itself. The planet is slowly dying. First the reefs and the swamps disappeared, swallowed by technology and the cities. Then the jungles, the woodlands, the tundra and finally even the mountains were taken by a wave of greed, corruption and filth.
But strangely, there is one place on this miserable, condemned planet that is still pure and untouched by all that is wrong in this world. A beach. Just one. There is not a trace of pollution on its golden sand.
This beach is the death spasms of Earth.
Funnily, not one corpse or piece of driftwood or garbage has been washed onto this last beach. In the days when a God was believed in, people would say that He was protecting this last memory of an unspoiled planet. I have the beach all to myself. No-one will find me lying here, thinking of a future that might have been.
I remember a time when the beach wouldn’t be touched by pollution, not because of the arcane protection that it seems to have now, but because there was none. At that time I spent most of my time in the ocean, in fact it was my life. The sea provided all of the food I ate, but I had to catch it. Now I will never be able to satisfy my appetite.
The beach supports life forms though long extinct; the cockroach, poison ivy, the red back spider, the dodo and many other creatures. Some of these were killed directly by humans, and others indirectly. The beach seems to attract animals near extinction. It has saved and refreshed many different species.
The rest of the planet is rotting like a bad apple, but this beach is the seed that may one day let the apple grow again. Long after mankind is nothing but a bad dream to Earth, this beach will be here, waiting.
But I will not be waiting.
Already my lungs are in agony, and my skin feels like acid has been poured on it. I can barely move. I am trapped and alone. I cannot reach the waters that will restore life for me. I am dying. This beach, this final flicker of a fire that once burned bright, is killing me. For I have spent my entire life escaping from what has destroyed this planet including the filth, the pollution, everything this beach is not.
Is it a cruel trick of fate then, that the last whale will not be killed by man but by the last beach?