“I wish I was dead,”
said the dead man.
And he was happy.
The end.
One
I packed my snorkel and started digging. The dirt looks different this time of year. I took off my red-tint sun glasses. Ah. Two feet deep now. I knew something better was waiting for me below the waterline. My mother was part fish and my father a Roman Catholic, so naturally _________________________________________.
Below the water line, I immediately saw something better. Let’s say: gold.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Ma! Gold!”
Ma came hobbling out with her cane, and beat me with it.
“Disrupting my Canasta game,” she muttered between lashings. Bubbles scuttled out between the words.
“I feel like I’m on an episode of Bojack Horseman,” I sobbed. She hobbled away, whistling an old fish nursery rhyme from her great-lobster-grandmother, which was passed down through coral history. (Don’t laugh.)
I kept digging below the waterline and found more and more treasures––treasures I wouldn’t even have comprehended as treasures five years ago, but which now were so emotionally charged that I broke down on my knees, and flung my gaze to the heavens, tears creating rainbow prisms in the bleak medio ambiente. One of the treasures was a tennis ball.
I knew better than to call out to Ma.
“Ma!” I shouted. “Guess what!”
I could hear her gathering her “slappin’ rod” from the cupboard, so I pressed up on my fins and leapt headfirst into the hole, swimming down into the darkness, and then like a salmon, upstream.
Two
Freedom wasn’t always a necessity.
Actually I’m not gonna start there. I’ll start with this:
Last year, my friends and I got stoned and watched the entire 30-episode run of “I now pronounce you Dick and Gimble,” the first alien television series to be broadcast on Earth. My girlfriend Diana said, “This was, honestly, not even close, the worst way I’ve spent a long period of time in all of my twenty-five years, including the five years I spent working in that sewage treatment cavern with no light and no water, other than the sweat and urine we each produced, captured and recycled through methods that aren’t nearly as technologically sound as they sound.”
Hmmm. “I liked it,” I said. “So did Derek and Fernando.”
“Derek and Fernando left The Bubble,” she said, and it was all she needed to say. To translate––since I know you’re reading this sixty or seventy years in the past, in 2025 maybe––what she was basically saying was: “Derek and Fernando are fuckwits.” What we once called Earth is now called The Bubble.
And they really did leave it.
I swam upstream into the outer reaches of Nermwalic Passionfield, which is over what was once Washington, D.C. In fact, I saw the very tip of the Washington Monument, poking up at me like a Horned Slobbertooth Nark, or some such vermin.
Do I need to explain what happened, or can you fill in the dots?
_________________________!
Fine. Here’s what happened:
The Earth went underwater––I don’t remember exactly how––and some people survived. Fifty years ago, in 2040, they started building New Crust, which was a new Earth crust on top of the water. “It’s kinda Lost City of Atlantis vibes,” claim the Elders, in their old people slang. Everyone born before 2030 has such a fucking thing about being born before the Sinking. It’s kinda gim. I guess you folks don’t have words like “gim” and “horka” and “yarz” but I’m not gonna translate. You can probably figure it out anyways.
Suddenly, swimming past the Empire State Building and approaching the CN Tower, I saw a flash of yellow light. I swam towards it––fast––and then I disappeared.
Three
I’ve never known how to end a story. Or whether, in fact, it’s even started. But I guess what I might say, to someone who wanted the story to end in a satisfactory way, or in a way that resolves some aforementioned problem, or creates a problem for some aforementioned solution, is that: really, it’s horka point. I mean, you’ll likely never experience this. You won’t be able to decide for yourself whether it’s heaven or hell. And even if you did, and could, you wouldn’t be right. None of us ever are. So, I don’t know. Did you learn something?