short story

      “Mama, I’m tired,” little Mika said.
      Elisa looked up at her son, “just a little while longer, dear, then we can have lunch in the house.”
      “But the sun is so hot, mama,” complained the child, while adjusting the straw sun hat on his head.
      Elisa put down her small brush and looked at her child with compassion. “I know dear, I wish things were different.” She sighed and looked at the large field around them. “But you know we have to pollinate these flowers. Or else the potatoes won’t grow, and we’ll be hungry this winter. Do you want to be hungry?”
      Mika had to think about this before shaking his head.
      Elisa focused her attention back on the plant between her knees, with a delicate hand she used her modified brush to caress the stamens of the little white and purple flower. She turned around and rubbed the brush on the carpel of an adjacent plant’s flower. It was tedious work but it had to be done. She looked up at the field around her again, squinting in the hot morning sun. Just a couple more days, she thought, than it will be done, fortunately.
      Mika made a sound, she looked at him, which he took as a sign to speak.
      “We did this last summer,” the boy said, “didn’t we, mama? I remember. But we were hungry last winter.”
      “You are right, but that was because of the heat. Do you remember that? How the sun kept shining very brightly until late October and how no rain fell from the sky for weeks on end?”
      Mika nodded but did not seem completely convinced.
      “Mama,” he said in a whimpering tone, “I don’t like the heat. Why is it always so hot? I wanna go inside.”
      “Just thirty more minutes, all right?”
      Mika shook his small head but went back to brushing the flowers at random, just like he’d been taught. Just like he’d been doing since he was four.
      I wish we could hire some help for this, Elisa thought sadly, but she knew that hiring help meant another mouth to feed for the season, something which was not an option. For that same reason she could not have another child, to her great sadness. Her friend Martha McKenzie, from a farm neighbouring theirs on the north side, had five children, two had died, but the other three were a great help on the farm. Elisa knew, though, that the family was struggling and had to go to extremes to feed so large a family. Bill, her husband, knew this too, that’s why he forbade the conception of any more children, knowing full well it hurt his wife. Elisa heard her son stand up, he’s really done for the morning, she thought with a sigh.
      “Mama?”
      “What is it, dear?”
      The boy looked at her with uncertainty written all over his small face, the brown eyes darting from her face to the ground and back again. “Sammy, at the McKenzie farm,” the boy said at length, talking about one of Martha’s kids, “he said there used to be small flying creatures that did this work. But I told him he was lying. I don’t believe him.” Mika looked his mother in the eyes, “he was lying, right mama?”
      Elisa walked over to her boy and took his hand. “Let’s go and have lunch,” she said, hoping the boy hadn’t seen the pain in her eyes.

Elisa was in the kitchen making lunch, while Mika played on the floor of the living room. He’d gotten his box of old Lego bricks and assorted action figures out of his room. Elisa looked at the boy, amazed at the ease with which the boy switched from work to play. He’d build a multi coloured house with the bricks for his action figures to live in. Most of the figures missed an arm or a leg. Elisa had to dig deep to name the characters, but she believed she recognised a Stormtrooper and an Iron Man figure. But who cares, nowadays, she thought, for him they are just figures, he’ll never even see the movies they were based on. But thank the Lord for durable plastic, she thought, whilst feeling guilty almost immediately. In the past decades plastic had become more of a nuisance than a blessing. The oceans were filled with useless plastic garbage and you couldn’t dig a hole without unearthing at least some piece of the stuff. Luckily not all of it was useless junk, Elisa thought, luckily my son has some colourful toys to call his own. She walked down the stairs to the cellar to get some goat cheese, a luxury the family could, luckily, afford. He’s earned it, she thought, while returning to the kitchen.
      They ate lunch in silence. Enjoying the coolness of the house. Elisa read an old book, while Mika ate with one hand while walking a particularly ugly figure across the table. After she finished her food Elisa padded the seat next to her and said, “come sit with mama.”
      The boy complied and looked at her expectantly.
      “You’re nearly ten,” she started uncertainly, “so I think it’s time you hear this.” She talked it over with Bill some time ago, he agreed the boy should be told when he appeared ready. “Do you remember what you said about the flying creatures? The one’s who used to do the work we did today?”
      Her son nodded, carefully, not knowing if what he had said would get him in trouble.
      “What Sammy told you was true,” Elisa continued, “there were creatures that pollinated the flowers for us. They were called bees. They were insects. Like flies and mosquitoes.”
      “I hate mosquitoes,” Mika said.
      Elisa laughed, “So do I, dear. But bees were different from mosquitoes. Bees pollinated the flowers, and they used to be everywhere, flying from flower to flower. They are the reason plants have flowers.”
      Mika tilted his head in disbelief and looked at his mother.
      “Bees liked the smell and colours of the flowers and came to them to collect nectar.”
      “What’s nectar?”
      “A sort of sugar,” Elisa replied after thinking about it for a short moment, “the bees used it to make honey, a very sweet liquid that people used to love.”
      “Would I love it?” Mika asked.
      “I’m sure you would,” she replied with a smile.
      “Can I have some?”
      “I wish you could, dear. But it doesn’t exist anymore, just like the bees.”
      That seemed to make the boy sad, “why?” he asked.
      Elisa had been dreading what came next, it had kept her awake many nights. How do you tell your child that your generation had stood by while the world died around you? How do I tell him that we could have prevented global warming, but did next to nothing? “Because,” she began slowly, “we didn’t take good care of the world. We used poisons to keep other insects from destroying our plants, not knowing that poison also killed the bees. And besides that we made the world grow hotter.”
      “How can you do that,” the boy asked, scepticism in his small voice.
      “That’s complicated.” she thought for a moment before continuing, “do you know the big tractor that delivers our water?” Her son nodded, “You know that is smells and smoke comes out of its back?” He nodded again, with enthusiasm. “There used to be many, many vehicles like that, cars they were called, and the smoke coming out of them was bad for the earth, it got in the air and caused more heat from the sun to stay on earth. Do you understand that?”
      The boy seemed to really think about it before saying, “Yes, I do, I think. But how many of those, uh, cars were there?”
      “More than you can imagine. One for every person on the planet almost. And there used to be a lot more people than there are today.”
      “More people than in Sheffield?” the boy asked, naming the largest city nearby, a place that was home to about ten thousand people.
      “Way more,” mother answered, “Sheffield would have been a small town, back then. Do you remember the pictures I showed you, the ones of The London Mountains?” Mika nodded. “Those weren’t mountains, those were buildings. People used to live in them, thousands of people.”
      Mika’s eyes widened, “they all lived in the sky?”
      “Nearly so, dear,” Elisa laughed, “those big towers were called skyscrapers and thousands of people lived on top of each other. London was a big city where millions of people lived. Do you know how much a million is?”
      Mika had to think about that, thinking back to his father’s math lessons no doubt. “It’s a lot!” he said to buy himself some more time before saying, “it’s a one with five, no six zeroes. Right mama?”
      “That’s right, my smart boy.”
      “Mama?” Mika asked, “but if all those people lived in the tower, where were their fields?”
      “They… we didn’t have field back then. Other people farmed the food for us and we just bought it in the store.” Mika looked at her with disbelief.
      “There were stores everywhere, they were just like the market in Blaxton we sometimes visit. We were used to buying everything we needed, or wanted.” Elisa fell silent, lost in thought.
      Mika broke the silence by asking, “but if the world got hotter, why is it so cold in winter.”
      “That’s a very smart question,” she said, smiling, proud of her son. “That’s because when the world got hotter and hotter other things started to change too. The weather used to be much less extreme because of currents in the oceans. Do you remember the ocean from our trip to Doncaster?”
      “It’s the big water, right mama?”
      “Correct, son.”
      “What are currents?”
      “Currents were like big ‘rivers’ under the ocean, they would bring cooler water to us in summer and warmer water to us in winter. So the temperature on land would be less extreme. But when the world got hotter the water got hotter all over the planet and those ‘rivers’ just disappeared.”
      Mika nodded, clearly thinking it over.
      Elisa thought he had understood her.
      “How old were you, mama, when it got hotter?”
      She had to smile. “It didn’t happen just like that,” she answered, while snapping her finger. “It took years. It got a bit warmer every year and the weather became more extreme. When I was young the world was already hotter than it was when my mother was young. We could have done something then… we should have…”
      He looked at her with puzzlement in his eyes. “Then why didn’t you stop it? If you knew the world was getting hotter then why didn’t you try to make it better?”
      Elisa shook her head, she could tell her son that it had already been to late by then, but she didn’t want to lie to her son. “Because people were selfish, do you know what that means?”
      “That’s when you think only of yourself, right?”
      She nodded, and said, “lots of people were very selfish back than. They kept driving their cars and buying stuff they didn’t need. We knew the world was changing, but we didn’t want to change the way we lived our lives. Even though we knew we were destroying the world!” She stared into empty air and said, more to herself than her son, “I think I didn’t even believe it at first. I never really thought things would get that bad. I thought it would all turn out okay in the end.”
      “So you never had to brush the flowers to make them grow when you were young?”
      “No,” she sighed, “I didn’t. The bees did that for us. And we didn’t even think about it. Until it was too late.”
      Mika jumped up and Elisa looked at him. His face had turned red and she could see tears beginning to form in his eyes.
      “You knew?” he asked, “you knew and you didn’t do anything. How could you, mama?”
      Elisa shook hear head, but before she could answer her son he yelled, “I hate the sun and I hate the heat and I hate the work we do. And I hate the winters and the cold and the ice. I hate it! And it’s all your fault. You should have stopped making the world sick!” He looked at her while the first tears started rolling down his cheeks. “I hate you!” He turned and ran out of the room. Bill drove his cargo bike under the sign that read ‘Johnson Farm’. His legs were tired from the long drive home. Home at last, he thought with a sigh. Bill was a small man with a short beard and tired looking green eyes. He wore simple clothes that had been repaired many times, at his side lay a small crossbow. He looked at the supplies in the box of the bike, Elisa will not be happy. He hadn’t been able to afford all the supplies he had been sent out for. The price of water had gone up again, and Bill hadn’t been able to buy the full amount his family needed in these dry months. To get the thousand litres they needed he had had to use some grocery money. Elisa will not be happy at all. The cost of delivery had also risen. Through the late afternoon haze he saw the house, its solar panels glistening in the sunlight. The three windmills farther down the road stood unmoving as trees. Damn, he thought, no wind again. I hope we got enough out of the solar panels, knowing that would not be the case. The solar panels were hand-me-downs and in desperate need of repair. They were old models, at least fifty years old, which meant they wouldn’t function as efficiently in the hotter months. He parked the cargo bike next to the house and carried the groceries inside, through the side door of the house. He expected to be greeted by the smells of his wife’s cooking, but this was not the case. The kitchen was empty and no food was cooking on the wood stove.
      “Elisa, honey, where are you?” he yelled.
      Bill found his wife in the living room, sitting, slumped over, on the sofa with an old picture book on her lap.
      “What’s wrong?” he asked while sitting down next to her and putting his arm around her. He could see that she’d been crying. The book on her lap showed a picture, taken some forty years ago, Bill guessed, of the City of London in its heyday.
      “How could we let it happen?” Elisa asked in a distant voice. Bill looked at the book before realising she must be talking about the death of the Old World. He knew she got melancholy sometimes, but this was the first time in many months that he had seen her as downtrodden as this.
      “How could we have known?” Bill said.
      Elisa looked up at him, anger in her eyes, “we knew!” she snapped.
      “I mean,” Bill said calmly, “how could we have known this would happen so bad, so fast.” Bill was eleven years older than his wife Elisa and remembered the times before the heat and the rising sea levels very well. He had been sixteen in the summer of 2019, the summer of the first Big Floods. Elisa had been just five, for her the Old World was nothing more than a vague memory, yet he knew she missed it even more than he did.
      “What happened today?” he asked, knowing her bout of melancholia must have been caused by something. She grabbed his hands and looked at him again, all anger in her eyes replaced by sadness.
      “I told Mika,” she said. After a long silence she continued, “he asked about the bees, apparently Sammy told him about it. So I decided to tell him how the world used to be.”
      “How did he react?”
      “Bad,” Elisa said, while she started crying again. “He said he hated this world and his life.” Bill held his wife tightly while she struggled to find her voice. “He ran to his room crying, and hasn’t come out since. I tried to talk to him an hour ago. But he just jelled for me to go away and leave him alone. Should I have gone in, and try to talk to him anyway?”
      “I don’t know,” Bill answered honestly, “it might have upset him more. Maybe he needed some time alone.”
      His wife nodded and looked at her hands.
      “What did you tell him, about the Old World that got him so upset?” Bill asked carefully.
      “Not much, really,” she sobbed, “but I did tell him how it was humanity’s fault that the climate changed. I told him we didn’t prevent it.”
      Bill knew what had happened, his son now blamed his parents for everything that was wrong in the world. “I wish you would have waited for me, before you told him,” he said.
      Elisa jumped up, the book on her lap fell to the floor, “don’t you dare!” she screamed, “don’t you dare blame me! You should have been here. You’re away longer every time you go out for supplies. Your place is here, with your family!”
      “But I’m only…” Bill began, angry, before stopping. He realised his wife didn’t really mean what she said and was just looking for someone to blame.
      “I’m here all day every day, because you say the world isn’t safe enough for me to go out in alone.” Elisa continued, “and while you are out there I’m here, raising our son all by myself. And now you act like this is my fault! Like I could…”
      “I never said that!” Bill said loud and forcefully.
      Elisa fell silent and looked shocked at her husband, he was not a man who raised his voice often. Her anger melted and she looked sad again, more sad than he had even seen her. He stood up and embraced his wife lovingly. “It will be okay, honey. Mika will understand eventually.”
      They stood like that for a long time, Bill holding his wife while her breathing returned to normal and the shivers stopped.
      “I’ll go check on Mika,” Bill said. He walked through the small hallway, to the back of the single-storey house. He knocked on Mika’s door. No response. He opened the door and walked into the room.
      “Mika, Mika where are you?” Bill looked around the room, under the bed and in the wardrobe, but Mika wasn’t there. He saw that one of the windows was open. “Honey, get in here!” he yelled.
      Elisa ran into the room, looking around it in a panic, “Where’s Mika?”
      “You tell me,” Bill snapped, “when did you last see him?”
      “Just after lunch, must have been around twelve. That’s when he ran to his room. And I talked to him briefly about an hour ago, like I told you.”
      “And after that,” Bill urged, “did you hear him make any sounds?”
      “I don’t remember,” she began to sound panicked, “I was so lost in thoughts while looking at old pictures. Maybe I heard something, but I didn’t speak to him.”
      Bill looked at his watch, “so he could have run away no more than an hour ago.”
      “Oh no,” Elisa said, hand in front of her mouth in shock, “why didn’t I come in, why didn’t I check up on him?” She looked Bill in the eyes, “I’m a horrible mother. You must hate me.” She started crying again while Bill took her into his arms.
      “No I don’t,” he said, “you’re a fantastic mother. Things like this could happen to anyone. But honey, I need you to be strong right now, I have to go out and look for him. You get on the radio and tell the neighbours to search their lands for him. Start with the McKenzie farm, I think that’s the first place Mika would go to.”

Bill had been gone for most of the evening and night, when the radio crackled. Elisa was sitting next to it, shaking with fear and fatigue. She jumped up at the sound.
      “Yes,” she cried into the speaker.
      “Elisa?” asked a women’s voice on the other end, “is that you?”
      She recognised the voice of her neighbour to the south-west.
      “Yes, yes,” Elisa said quickly, “Nicole, it’s me.”
      “Paul just radioed in,” Nicole said, “he found a shoe, near Allas Lane. He thinks it could be Mika’s.”

Elisa was standing in front of the house next to her mountainbike. Bill slowed down. He had been up all night, looking in all the fields to the north of the farm, between the McKenzie farm and theirs. He had found nothing. Elisa had radioed her husband to tell him that Paul Jones might have found something, south-west of the farm. She had insisted on joining him, so he passed the house on his way to the Jones farm.
      “Have you heard anything else?” he asked.
      “Nothing, just that they found a shoe near Allas Lane. And that Paul would be waiting for us at the Moor and Allas Lanes intersection.”
      Together they cycled the, roughly, five miles to the beginning of Allas Lane, where they found Paul waving at them with a torch. Bill jumped of his bike, letting it fall to the ground, and ran up to Paul, who showed him the little shoe. Bill was at a loss for words, he turned towards Elisa as she approached and showed her the shoe, it was Mika’s.
      Paul showed them where he found the shoe, about five hundred yards east, close to the Broomhead Reservoir, a small lake that usually provided water to all the neighbouring farms in the spring. In summer, though, it nearly dried up, leaving only small puddles of dirty water.
      “Where do you think he might have gone to?” Paul asked carefully.
      “Wish I knew,” Bill said, thinking hard, “there is nothing for him out here. He might have gotten lost.”
      “Or something chased him?” Elisa said through her tears, “why else would he leave his shoe?”
      Together they walked the entire length of Allas Lane and found nothing. They followed New Road past the edge of the reservoir, yelling Mika’s name.
      The sun came up and Bill put his torch away, he saw enough in the early morning light and wanted to safe the torch’s batteries for when he really needed them. He looked out at the reservoir and thought he saw something. “This way,” he yelled to Elisa and Paul. Together they crossed the cracked-up bottom of the reservoir until they reached the object Bill had seen, it was another of Mika’s shoes.
      Bill looked around the dry lakebed, shouting his son’s name at the top of his lungs. He saw movement farther down the lake, near one of the remaining small pools of dirty water. As he approached he saw what it was, a fox, standing on the waters edge, between some yellowish reeds. The animal looked up startled. It stared at Bill for a moment then decided to make a run for it. Bill reached the place where the fox had been and crashed to the dry earth. In between the reed he found his son lying on the ground. At the sound of the approaching man the boy looked up.
      “Daddy,” Mika said with a weak voice.
      “Son,” Bill cried, “we were so worried. We thought… we…” emotions prohibited him form finishing his sentence. Instead he grabbed the small body of the child and held it tightly to his chest. Elisa arrived running and dropped on her knees next to her husband. With tears rolling down her cheeks she took her son from Bill. From between his mothers arms Mika looked at his father with large, scared, eyes. Bill smiled at his son, hoping to convey that everything was all right again.
      The boy coughed before saying, “Where did the fox go?”
      “It ran off,” Bill answered.
      Mika made a sad face, “but I liked him.”
      Elise turned Mika so she could look into his eyes, she found enough of her voice back to say, “I’m sorry, dear. I’m so sorry about what happened today.”
      “It’s okay mama,” he smiled up at her, “I was angry, but I’m not anymore. I was angry at you, and papa, for making the world the way it is. But now I’m determined.”
      Elisa looked at Bill, uncertainty showing on her face.
      “I’m determined,” Mika continued, “because of the fox. He has to live in this world too. And he has no power to change it. But we do. Don’t we papa?”
      Bill nodded, tears forming in his eyes.
      Mika continued, “the fox has to accept the world the way it is, but we humans changed the world once, maybe we can do it again. And maybe we can change things for the better this time.”