Choking Skies

"When the air turned toxic, survival became the only story left to tell."

The sky was once blue. People had forgotten what that looked like. For the last twenty years, the sky above the city of Virelia had been a permanent shade of gray—thick, heavy, and still. The sun rarely pierced through the layers of soot and smog, and when it did, it cast an eerie, orange glow that felt more like a warning than warmth.

The air was poison now. Everyone knew it. They wore masks, not for fashion, but for life. Children grew up thinking clean air was a myth, a bedtime story their grandparents told to make them dream of impossible things.

In the ruins of what used to be a park, fifteen-year-old Amira crouched under the metal skeleton of a rusted swing set. She carefully pulled a cracked plastic bag over her nose as an extra filter to her mask—her official government-issued filter had been overdue for replacement for three months. She had already had two friends collapse from lung damage, and she wasn’t ready to be next.

Amira was a scavenger. One of thousands of teens who combed through the abandoned outskirts of the city each day, looking for scraps of copper wire, old batteries, even moldy food that could be traded for cleaner water. Her little brother, Leo, waited for her every evening in a windowless apartment they shared with their aunt, a silent woman whose lungs wheezed every time she tried to speak.

As Amira moved through the hollow remnants of a supermarket, her breath came out in short, calculated huffs. The pollution was worse today—thicker, like tar. She wrapped a scarf around her already-masked face and pushed forward. On aisle five, beneath collapsed shelves, she found it: a sealed can of beans. Intact. She smiled behind her mask. This was gold.

Suddenly, a sharp siren wailed across the sky. The clouds above rippled unnaturally, and a greenish haze began to descend.

"Acid wave incoming. Seek shelter immediately."

The automated voice blared across the speaker poles lining the streets, most of them half-fallen or malfunctioning. Amira’s heart raced. Acid rain. She only had minutes.

Clutching the beans, she darted out the broken front of the store and sprinted toward the nearest shelter. The air was already burning her exposed hands. She slipped on oil-slick pavement but kept moving.

A metallic door embedded in the sidewalk loomed ahead—a public air vault. It was open.

Amira ducked inside and slammed it shut. A hiss sounded as the inner chamber pressurized. She fell to her knees, coughing hard as her lungs tried to expel the smog she had inhaled. Her mask had broken.

Inside the vault, a few others sat slumped against the walls—elderly men, a crying toddler, a woman with a cracked face shield. No one spoke. Speaking wasted oxygen.

Above ground, the world burned in silence.

Two hours later, the door reopened. The air outside was marginally better—still dangerous, but not instantly fatal. Amira made her way back home, clutching the can like a trophy.

Their building was barely standing, its windows long shattered, plastic sheets nailed over them like makeshift lungs. Inside, Leo ran to her and hugged her tightly, burying his masked face in her soot-stained coat.

“I found beans,” she said hoarsely.

Leo’s eyes lit up. “Real ones?”

She nodded.

Their aunt sat on the floor, knitting what looked like a scarf out of old plastic. “The sirens hit again today,” she wheezed.

“I know. I was outside.” Amira began heating the beans over a makeshift solar panel cooker. “The sky’s worse than yesterday.”

“It’s always worse,” her aunt said, eyes distant.

That night, Amira looked out the hole in the ceiling that used to be their skylight. The clouds shifted lazily above, slow-moving death veils. She wondered what the world looked like before everything went gray. The history books said it was the factories—endless consumption, careless waste, the refusal to stop burning things they couldn’t replace. The air used to belong to everyone. Now it belonged to the few who could afford to bottle it.

Rumors spread that beyond the eastern mountain ridge, a settlement called Clearwater had found a way to grow trees again. Trees that actually breathed. Amira had never seen a tree in her life. Just illustrations in a children’s book.

“Do you think Clearwater is real?” Leo whispered as he lay beside her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But we’re going to find out.”.

In the morning, with a half-pack of water, the can of beans now empty, and her brother’s hand in hers, Amira stepped into the haze. She didn’t know how far Clearwater was, or if it even existed. But staying meant slow death.

They were two silhouettes against the gray sky, walking east through a world forgotten by its creators, searching for one that might remember how to breathe again.