a short story in English
Entstanden für den Englisch-LK am HBG. Alle Fehler und Ungereimtheiten sind ohne Ausnahmen alle absichtlich eingeflochten worden und dienen der Verwirrung des Lesers.
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When I was a child with a child’s irrational optimism, asking me about the future would always lighten up my eyes and make me present my bright vision of flying cars, colourful plantations, blue skies and happy people – a world that was to come.
Entering the narrow corridor I tried to figure out why the memory of my childhood with its naive thoughts used to come up that often since the world turned from a huge pile of garbage into an even bigger, in fact even monstruously huge heap of misery, pain and injustice. Maybe it was due to the contrast between my childhood memories and today’s reality, maybe my mind just replayed those utopian thoughts to conserve at least the last bit of my once optimistic personality. Probably, however, it was something I knew. Something I had suspected at the very point the destaster had become visible at the horizon of time, something that grew more and more to an awareness while the people were too busy handling the problems in their small world. Yes, the more I thought about it, the more logical it became. I had to think about my former utopian ideas because I knew all along that one day, this plant’s inhabitants had to pay for their self-pleasing ignorance towards the world.
Year after year, the human race had faced the consequences of their behaviour. In the 20th century, glaicers melted, trees died, the rain forests were lumbered and oil reserves were burnt to carbon dioxide and then blown into the atmosphere. The beginning of the new millenium then marked the beginning of the end of the human race. The gulf stream abbed in 2010. The average temperatures in Europe dropped by 6 degrees Celsius. Millions of people spent the world’s last oil reserves on heating faster than any estimates could be generated. The stock markets and world markets crashed, as did everything else. Without oil, everything suddenly came to a grinding halt. The industry hadn’t been prepared to have to operate without oil already in 2012 so there was no more industry, no electricity, no communications and no travelling. The few companies that had plans for alternate technologies either failed because their futuristic inventions couldn’t be assembled without the use of oil or because they couldn’t produce in the extremely low temperatures of a Siberian Winter, which is the term used to describe the average European’s summer nowadays. In effect, billions of people died. Diseases spread and as the absence of oil had also stalled the production of pharmaceuticals, so that each wave of influenza would decimate the rest of the world’s population significantly. Precisely speaking, we were doomed. The few of us that had survived the years after 2012’s breaking-apart of the human society were soon involved in a war between the survivors. Far more than 7000 years of civilization and now our blindness had thrown us back into the stone age, living in small communities that are in war with each other, fighting for survival.
The only difference is that back then, there was still a world to fight for. Today, there isn’t much of a world left. Fortunately. Because otherwise, it wouldn’t be that easy to die for me. There were only a few minutes left to my death – I was to be killed, gutted, eaten and then burnt to extend the hopeless lifes of the people I lived with. From time to time, when the world was even more hostile than usual, someone had to be sacrificed in order to give the others a chance to survive and this time, it was me.
I entered the room and, without hesitation, took the old rusty knife that the chosen people like me use to cut their own throat. One quick stab into the heart and a quick cut along the throat – it was done, my death inevitable. I don’t regret it. I’m leaving this world voluntarily because there is nothing left on this side of the world to life for. Maybe it is just a dream – maybe the world that fades to black in front of my eyes doesn’t exist. Maybe I will wake up. Wake up – hopefully.