Sand And Water

• Theodore Baker-jones, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2015

As I flew above the city, I saw many things. I saw an empty hole were beauty must once have been, I saw water in a land that never rained, I saw metal rocks that used the water to change the weather, and I saw just how hollow the display really was. The desert around it was dry, but the city itself was full of water. Water in clouds that used to change the weather, but are now too small and ragged to do anything, water in great lakes that once built a civilisation from desert sand, but now barely scrape the low water line. The water that once was pumped from huge underground reservoirs was drying up. The humans were fools. They had taken this as a success before they had good information, and now the fifty MagicWater cities are all going to face the same plight as this one. The humans below were scurrying about trying to save their cities, but no matter what they claimed to do, when the reservoirs dried up they could no more turn sand into water than fly. As I flew above this last failing marvel of human evolution, I in equal measures laughed at them and cursed their foolishness. If they had perhaps been a little less selfish and more prudent, perhaps they, and the whole world could have survived. For to them, in their idea of geography, the city stood in the middle of the Congo Basin. All the water that used to exist here had been used, intoxicated, and dumped out of sight and out of mind. The water in the underground reservoirs had sustained this city for three years, but even in that short space of time the humans had used a water source that would have sustained any other creature for at least 30 years. They had not thought to change their behaviour, but instead had simply accessed the last water source in all places in the world where it was useable. Now, everything on the planet would pay the price. The humans would now spend the remaining time they had making space ships, something that they had been working on for decades. But the beak of an eagle is not built for such tasks, and neither me nor my family could hope to escape the dying world. We were trapped in this place until it died, and us with it. So I returned to my eyrie to wait, while the dry sands swept in.