Burning Low by Candlelight

February, 2050

Among the hills of the Southern Tier, in the region that was once New York State:

There's a house in the woods. It is moss eaten, no longer a home.

It crumbles at the corners.

There are toys on the porch, half buried in leaves: a little plastic firetruck, a deflated basket ball, and a few dinosaurs.

But the T-Rex is standing upright, off to the side.

There are plastic milk jugs too, they are full of stagnant water.

The roof of this building sags like a wet blanket and the front door sits cocked to one side like a crooked smile.

But this dead cabin holds a flicker of life— the faintest heartbeat: a candle burning in one cracked window.

Inside, under the dripping ceiling two weary faces behold one another in the flickering light.

Both faces are caked with grime, both are gaunt, both are solemn. One face hints at a buried youth. Underneath the dirt and the soot, this face whispers signs of life. This face speaks to a coil of secret, lingering hope. It belongs to a boy called 'Faff'.... The vapor of his breath curls like smoke from his lips and he wrinkles his nose.

"It smells in here."

"I know. That's mildew."

The boy looks up and into the older face.

This older face is a ruin of age and despair. The lines in the forehead are caked with sweat-grit. This face hides no secrets, least of all the secret of hope. This face believes in a doomed future, its eyes declare a beaten soul. This face belongs to a man called 'Dad.'

"Do we have to stay in here?"

Outside the cabin the wind blows and the rain begins to fall. The man watches and listens and sighs.

There had been times, midsummers long ago, when he'd loved the rain and thanked it for washing away the heat and cleansing the dust from the choked air. There was a time when he had breathed deep the taste of the winds and the smell of the rain-beaten flowers... a time when he'd thanked the world for being so beautiful.

But that time was gone and memory served him nothing but bitterness and longing. The rain of this new world was not mercy and it was not relief. It muddied their paths, soaked them to their bones... and it was cold.

They were already damp from hiking through the intermittent drizzle.

"Dad? Can't we just make another lean-to? Those never smell bad."

He pulls his gaze back from the gloom and looks at the boy whose eyes still haven’t lost their sparkle. His son. One of the very last sources of beauty left to an ugly, empty world. And wasn't that all the worse-- that such a beautiful child should be given to such darkness? To such hopelessness?

"No, we sleep here tonight."

The man thinks of the plastic toys they noticed walking in. He thinks of how he told the boy to put the T-Rex back-- not to touch it ever again.

And he thinks how they were both in mourning then: the man grieving a world lost and the boy grieving a world unknown.

He wants to apologize-- not only for the mildew, but for everything.

All he manages to say is: "Hang your gloves. And your jacket."

"What about my moccasins?"

The man looks at the floor. It’s covered with a layer of dust and mold, but there's also the secret glint and shimmer of broken glass.

"Are they wet?"

"I don't know. My socks are."

The man grunts. He gestures to the boy, lifts him gently and sets him on a wooden chair.

He wants to be tender, but innocence is no longer any protection, neither is ignorance.

The boy is only 7 years old but famine and violence... these evils pay no mercy to the naivety of youth. 7 is old enough to starve and it is old enough to be hunted by the desperate.

His daughter had been 5 at the time. At that point the boy had only been a toddler.

Small enough to carry and that was the only reason he'd survived.

The man pushes the memories out of his mind:

The memory of his daughter and his wife falling behind.

The memory of their screams.

The memory of the boy crying out for his mom and the memory of the finger shaped bruises over the boy's mouth, from where the man clenched him silent as they fled.

The boy needs to grow up, and fast-- he needs to be able to make his own decisions: whether and when to dry his moccasins, where to sit or to stand, and when to clasp his own mouth shut to better hide from the sharps and the hazards and the dangerous.

So the man makes no effort to dull the scathing edge of his voice: "If your socks are wet, then your moccasins are too. Do you really gotta ask? One day, I'll be gone. And you're going to need to be able to answer your own damn questions. So you tell me, do you think you need to take off your moccasins?"

The boy frowns. He looks down.

And despite himself, the man feels guilty for adding more abrasion to the child’s already bleak world. "Yeah Faff, hand 'em to me. After they dry, I'm going to treat them with some more pitch. But you keep your butt in that chair. There's broken glass all over the the floor."

He looks down at the boy. What kind of life is this?

A decade or two ago, things had felt so... stable.

Things had felt so optimistic.

Even when news cycle started reporting on the mysterious, rapid emergence of Plastophila melanogaster, things hadn't felt... fucked.

In those days, P. melanogaster had kind of seemed like a godsend. A sensational new species of fruit fly that metabolized plastics?

Yes please!

It had seemed evolution had handed them a miracle cure for the problem of pollution: cheap, clean, organism-based environmental remediation.

He remembered the excitement that everyone had felt-- hell, he remembered the excitement that he'd felt. The first time he thought about Mother Earth making a comeback, electric chills had shot up his spine.

He remembered the memes-- headstones with an RIP for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

But now he shelters with his only remaining family, under a rotting old roof.

And the boy was... Smiling?

Why was the boy not daunted? How long before he gave up?

He knew he should break the boy, for the boy's own good. Because the longer the boy carried that fool hope, the more it would hurt when it finally betrayed him.

He knew: if the boy carried that fool hope into the wrong wilderness, it could get him killed.

The man new he had to destroy that stupid, blind optimism, and chain the boy to reality.

But what's the point of living without any joy?

And the man is standing before he even recognizes his own impulse.

"Wait here son."

He hands the boy a strip of venison jerky, then he walks out to the porch. He limps under the weight of his own decision. He feels the whole world rushing up to meet him as he bends down to pick up the T-Rex.

His hands shake as he picks it up, the man cannot help frowning.

It feels heavier than lead. He wipes a tear away from his unwashed cheek.

Then the man scoops up a stegosaurus and a triceratops and the firetruck too-- he shakes the leaves off of these fleeting treasures.

The pulls the toys close to his chest and his whole body trembles.

And he cannot possibly begin to say why.

He stumbles back inside, clumsily batting the crooked door open with his elbow.

The boy's eyes light up-- with curiosity more than anything.

"I thought you said we couldn't touch those things."

"I did. But maybe I was wrong."

"What are they dad."

"Plastic toys."

"Toys?"

"Just, things you play with. You can play with them. Go ahead."

"So, they're not dangerous?"

"No, not to us. I guess they were dangerous to The Earth, once upon a time."

"How could anything be dangerous to The Earth?"

"Well we-- not you and I, I mean people in general-- we made lots of things out of plastic. Not just toys. We used plastic to store our food and stop it from spoiling. We used plastic to build shelters."

He lifts the firetruck, holds it out to show the boy. "This is called a vehicle. It rolls across the ground like this.... We used to make them big enough to sit in-- and they'd carry us anywhere we wanted to go. We used 'em to carry food and tools and toys all over The Earth."

"Why'd people get rid of them?"

The man frowns.

How to explain total loss, to a child who has no concept of the world before?

"Well, we didn't get rid of them on purpose. One day all our plastic things started to decompose. Remember when we saw that rotting deer last week? It was like that. But with all the plastic parts."

"Ewww. That's gross."

"Well. Yeah, it was. And it meant our cars couldn't go anymore because the plastic parts rotted off."

"Why didn't people just make those parts out of something else?"

The man sighs. "We didn't have systems in place-- or the systems we had fell apart. But by the time people realized what was happening, things were already pretty bad, and the situation was moving way too fast for anyone to catch hold of. Back then there were a lot more people on the earth, and we used plastics to carry our food and keep it fresh. We worked together to keep everybody fed. But when the plastics rotted away, our food did too. And that meant there were a whole hell of a lot of desperate, hungry people. People started panicking, and that meant they stopped working together. They started working against each other."

He remembers the collapse of agriculture and transportation. He remembers the frantic, terrifying, widespread hunger.

He remembers the fires and the looting and the mobs-- and the authorities pulling out and away from the madness. And he remembers fleeing the city with his pregnant wife-- fleeing on foot, with a cotton pack full of any non-plastic survivalist gear he could scrounge up.

He remembers wondering how many were lost in that first die off-- how many starved? And wondering how many more in the subsequent die offs.

At the collapse of sanitation and medicine? Forget about chronic illnesses and the impossibility of maintaining a prescription.

Diseases-- both new and forgotten-- sprung back up into the perfect storm of complete and total infrastructure collapse.

And he thinks of The Wars. That's what survivors called them then, but really they weren't wars. "War" implies politics and centralized powers. But there were no centralized powers. The violence that sprung up all across the globe was not political. It was entirely primal and fixated on one thing: survival.

He remembers the roving bands.

He remembers the one time he tried venturing back towards a city, to scavenge medical supplies-- and he remembers the silence and so many bones in the street and the charred husks of buildings.

He looks at the boy, the only family he has now.

And the boy, his boy remembers none of these troubles.

He hands him the toys and tells him to play and looks away to avoid showing his tears because he no longer has the heart to harden the child.

Let him play!

Let him imagine some happiness in this world that has been broken beyond all reckoning.

And the man, he gets to work warming some of the food they'd foraged during the day.

And he sweeps the broken glass off the floor and piles some moldy cushions.

And listens to the T-Rex roars coming from his son.

***

In the morning, the man casts his gaze out through the cracked window.

The sun is rising. A terrible orange light sneaks across the eastern treetops and casts a fiery glow.

Hell is looming, another day.

But the boy says it looks pretty and the man thinks about it and shrugs and nods because the boy is right.

***

***

***

January 2025, Along the coast of New Jersy, in her mom's basement.

A grad student researching fruit flies, Drosophila Melanogaster, and reading about the plastic eating bacteria, Ideonella sakaiensis, has an idea.

....