The Somberness of smog

Sludgy, murky pools

 

Chapter three, 'Sludgy, murky pools'.

Two days before

"Scruff, I remember the waters that swum within the comfort of cemented walls, in the pool back home. It was always nice to take a break from the humid warm wind, we always got that in the east; hot blaring summers and cold chilly winters. It was crazy how we're all so oblivious to the symptoms of climate change. But when the smog appeared this October, everyone realized that it wasn't just obscure weather. The prolific wildfires, raging tides, searing summers and deadening chilly winters, all of it, in that extremity,... it wasn't normal.

On the summers when breath was immaculate and the trees touched the skies with leaves of green; we'd swim. Jafari would pester me, the words Marco Polo swung from his lips. He'd swim with his brown eyes closed, dipping into the water. Jafari was asthmatic, air drew into his chest soon like cheese, as to one's stomach whose lactose intolerant. Eventually he'd stop dead in his tracks and wallow towards the pools edge. I found in summer we'd always swim. Even on those strange summer days, where the rain showered down and where the wind's whisk was icy: I'd swim.....we'd swim.

In late November, Jafari, in his great boredom, stepped out from the chilliness of the house. He peered through the rotted door, the thickened smog constricted around his skin. There was a prick he felt, as though this smog had bit into him, oozing from beneath his skin feelings of fear and sadness. All around my brother, trees wheezed from their toxic breaths. The weeping myrtles, their drooping branches the colour of black, their intricate leaves shriveled, unwillingly swaying in the brown wind. There was a parting of dead vegetation, where soil crept like a serpent through its lengths. Jafari leapt through the path, bolting straight into the embrace of the smog and atop the back of the spitting snake.

I don't know why Jafari thought it was a good idea; I do not think my mother raised her son to swim in sludgy, murky pools: but he did so.

A gaze of smog scraped against the auburn water. The haze stabbed his sight, all that was seen was fuzz and cloud. But below the smog, currents shifted of brown, leaf carcasses and crippled insects wavered within its folds. Pungent bitterness floated atop the wind. The ethereal hands of such wind bellowed of its corrupted flow. The murk of the smog stretched the breaths of the wind's veins. As the wind whispered, the smell branched from its lips and touched the streets. The smell of death, the smell of pungent bitterness, carried out by wind's parted mouth.

As silence shifted through the dead room, a scream pierced at my unsettled ears. I tousled to my feet, running through the murkiness of the house. My chest had sunk through my stomach, where the acidic fluids burnt and whisked at my heart. The world had come to resemble that of an alien plant, my eyes did not recognize this corrupted and dead world. Specks of dust pained the corners of my eyes as I dashed down the path's spine. The bright brown of the smog painted the skies, to an extent that my friends, the stars, the eyes, no longer could peek to see humanity; to see me. I scrambled with a fastened pace over bone-like branches, as though the dead world wished to cling with its fallen ligaments at my covered legs. There, ahead, through haze and bitterness sat the pool.

Jafari was reaching weakly at the tiles, trying to pull his body upon the edge. I had thrown my hands over my cracked lips, ripped my feet from their frozen state, and scrambled in a fluster towards him. His skin had become many shades of red, lesions of blisters had formed, puss arising amid. Blood smeared in streaks down his stomach and back, his cries rang into the air in trills of pain.

When I managed to pull him out of the sickly waters he had gone limp with exhaustion."

Glassiness plagued her eyes, and though Mia would claim it to be something in her eye, she wished and wished to cry. Even though she knew no one was around, or alive, Mia kept her cries bottled beneath her dry lips. For, if this glass were to shatter it would not hold water. She would crumble.

"I lifted him with my wobbling arms, he shook and twitched as his eyes flickered like shifting tides. My feet patted across the path and through the rotted door. I lowered Jafari onto the white of the kitchen tiles, to which a fever pulsed upon his skin.

Days later infection grew in his burns and wounds, and he became suspended in a haven of sleep. We could not take him to the hospital, it had closed down many weeks ago. We could not get medicine, the chemist had closed down also. My mind had been thrown through thorns, to which the thought of Somberness infecting my brother tore at the flesh of my soul. Mum had stuck to his side like glue. She dabbed damp towels at his wounds each hour and lifted up his jaws to feed him canned soup through a metal spoon.

Each night we sat by his side, the white of mum's eyes were shattered red. She'd fall asleep by mistake every few hours, where she dreamt of his death and awake in cold sweats, and scream and shake me at my shoulders. When days whisked at his wounds, I saw his eyes flicker glassy and his lips parted to cough. And, as though a cough announced his fate, mum fell into tears.

She'd cry each hour and I'd cry each hour, we'd cry till we swore Jafari's breathless coughs were the devils melody. He'd grown too weak to lift his head, thus he laid on the warmth of the leather couch, his eyes came to open and plead for life. Somberness had cursed him, he'd fallen into an abyss of dimness to which the flowers of his heart could no longer bloom. His lips trembled, his eyelids fluttered and his mind bellowed for an act of mercy. But Somberness could not comprehend such a thing.

So he kept falling,

He kept coughing,

Till he met the bottom of the abyss,

Till he died.

This disease was a hooded figure in black, with a staff of red clasped to its hand and a chuckle of maliciousness bellowing through its divided lips. This disease was evil.

That was the day mum had blinded herself in grief and taken her suitcase and mine to the front door. It was the day we left the suburbs and it was the day I came to realize that Somberness wasn't like the darkness of a night, but alas a darkness of the night with the absence of the stars, ...terrifying."

A thirst clenched at her chest. Water was scarce, and she barely had enough to last another week. The water beyond the shed was sick and idly in regards to hydration, even beyond, all the water had been reduced to brown or black sludge, undrinkable and likely Somberness ridden. Mia was sad, so ridden with sorrow that every breath seemed hard, because it was a breath the dead, the ones she wished for, could not take.

Mia knew the water was sick and everything which once breathed, no longer was able to do such a thing. Her sorrow came from the fact that she could not change that. Mia could not bring back the dead trees, Mia could not bring back the dead animals, and Mia especially could not bring back the dead people. Because though she wished she could, she could not bring back the dead.

And that, that was what drove her insane the most, the fact that she could not change what had been done.