2170...

• Patrick Rudd, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2017

I ran my age-worn fingers through her hair. They were shaking uncontrollably. Those soothing words I kept repeating in my head weren’t true. My three-year-old granddaughter was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it. Theodora’s parents had passed in the floods, and I was the only one left to care for her. But now, she too would reach her untimely fate. We all would.
“I’m… hungry… Nana.”
She stared at me blankly, with those innocent, green eyes that fostered mystery.
“I know,” I said, stuttering on my words as they squeezed past the beginnings of tears in my throat. How could I tell her there was nothing to eat? That we were all going to starve to death. All twenty-six of us. That is if we didn’t drown first. We were in the tiny attic of a two story building. The first story was completely underwater, and it was too dangerous to go onto the second.
The powerful drone of the cicadas drowned out every other noise. That included the floods, so it was welcomed by most. Sanity relies on distractions. Distractions from the truth. What used to be an annoying hum was now one of the only surviving links to the natural world. A sign of life.
Essential in the night when the otherwise silence allowed time for memories to creep up on you.
“Help...” A male’s weary cry weaved through the cracked wood on the wall beside me. Curious, I searched the street below through the rust-stained glass of a window. It appeared a man was trying to float in the floods. It didn’t look like he knew how to swim, and debris of buildings in the fast currents had probably injured him. My heart hammered as I relived their death. My own daughter. Theodora’s parents.
I looked down at the man, choking on the guilt of how helpless I was. Anyone who could swim wouldn’t stick around starving in this small attic. I gasped again. That was the stupid advice I’d given my daughter. Now, I would lose them both.
Theodora’s delicate frame went cold and limp in my arms, and I felt for a pulse.
Nothing.
I closed my eyes, tears fusing my eyelashes together. I wanted to scream. I wanted there to be someone to blame; to yell at. But there wasn’t. And I just turned towards the wall, cowering away from the sorrowful looks, and hummed. I hummed the faithful tune of the cicadas, my mind too dazed to care what other people thought.
The floods had killed her. They murdered her the same way they killed my daughter. Theodora should have lived a normal life. Had a normal childhood with a normal climate. But she didn’t, and I can only blame my ancestors.
What if they had thought ahead? Cared about Theodora. About the generations succeeding theirs.