The Glass City [#Wattys2016]

Part 1

Just a short dystopian fiction that i wrote for school- enjoy!

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I awake to the sound of coughing.  I slip out of bed, my feet tapping on the dusty wood floor.  One, two, three steps.  My feet grow cold, but I keep walking anyway.  I push open my sister's door slowly, and I hear her sheets softly rustle.  Another hacking cough fills my ears.  Her window is closed, and her room is completely dark, pitch black.  Holding my hands out slightly in front of me, I stumble through the dark until I reach her bed.
"Hey Cass," I whisper.  I push myself onto the edge of her bed and stroke the quilt gently.  My eyes have somewhat adjusted to the lack of light, so I see her slowly sit up, only to be pulled back down when she starts coughing again.
"Can you tell me a- a story?" Cassidy asks me, only to collapse into another coughing fit.  She's had this lingering cough for years, but it's been slowly getting worse- one of the side effects of the pollution.
"Of course," I reply.  I tell the same story that our mother used to tell us every night before she passed, the story I've practically memorized.  It tells of a beautiful place, a grassy meadow surrounded by trees, with a sky as blue as a blueberry, crystal clear water, and at night, silver stars that shine down with a big, round, silver moon.  There are lots of animals there, animals on four legs, six legs, and some, like the snakes, with no legs at all.  And there are the humans, the two little girls, that play in the meadow with the animals.  The girls that Cass and I pretended to be on the edge of the wasteland.  But somehow, it doesn't have the same effect when the sky is black and the air is so polluted that we wear cheap gas masks outside.  No amount of pretending can wipe away these little details.
I hear her breathing slow, and I can tell she's fallen asleep, but I keep telling the story anyway, in hopes that it will calm me.  I direct my gaze to the window.  There is no moon like in the story, and no stars either.  The sky is black, only slightly darker than in the day.  If stars ever existed, they have run away from the ash and the gas and the fossil fuels.  This story used to fill me with a sense of hope, that maybe there was a better place in this cruel, cruel world, that maybe we could all go there some day.  But now it only fills me with dread.
There is no better place, not anywhere.  We have killed this planet, slain it with our bare hands, just like our ancestors did before us.
And now we're stuck here, with no way out.