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Storm In A Bottle

by Josh Aubin

December 2010

A young boy and a girl sat down on a rock beside a large lake. It stretched out before them beyond the horizon, ebbing up before them in a calm, mild manner.

The boy pulled an apple and knife out of his satchel. He cut the apple in half, giving one half to the girl, who looked at it with an anxious look.

“It’s the last we have, isn’t it?” the girl asked.

The boy gave her a long look before nodding. They both ate slowly as they looked around at the horizon.

It was last days of The Great Collapse. Humanity had destroyed the Earth. All resources were gone, all the land and water was polluted. Most people had already died from starvation and disease. The water and land around them was all painted in brown and grey as the world began to breath it’s final breaths.

They came to their last bites of the apple, each eating right down until nothing was left. The last bite left a bitter and cold taste in their mouths. They looked back at each other for a few moments. Nothing was left to be said.

They sat by the lake until night had come and the air turned cold. They stumbled weakly away from the lake to find shelter and never returned to the lake.

It was a few generations later a scientist stood by the same rock, looking out over the lake. The water was black and ominous, and the ground surrounding him was all grey and lifeless. The trees were all decaying into the ground and just emerged as dark shadows around him.

He looked out on the lake for a long moment, breathing heavy, aged breathes. He was barely 30 years old and his hair was greying and his body ached with old age. He coughed slightly as he looked around the lake, his mind distracted from the scene by heavy thoughts.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small beaker, which he raised up to his face and looked thoughtfully at it. Inside of the beaker sat a small blue pill, just the size of his thumbnail. He looked at it anxiously. That pill was his life’s work; he had spent most of his time reforming and perfecting it in his lab just a short walk away from the lake. Most life on Earth was gone; the water was all too toxic to support anything. First went the rivers, and then the lakes. The oceans all turned to grey as all life died away, in the last moments of civilization known as The Great Collapse. Lives and lifetimes ended. Technology and progression had outweighed resources, and everything became used and destroyed. People still lived and inhabited the Earth, though never in the great numbers and prosperity as the old days. Civilization, evolution, wildlife and the promise of a future; all these became things of the past.

He continued to observe the beaker in front of him. The pill had been reworked and revised over all these years. Hundreds of tests of trial and error amounted to what he now had. The pill caused a chemical chain reaction that would spread throughout the water and separate the hydrogen and oxygen from all the toxins and infestations down to their purest essence. A storm in a bottle, he thought, it would change everything. He looked out into the water, watching the black surface shift lifelessly around.

He took a long breath as he walked to the edge of the water. It ebbed slowly up to his feet, as he took a long last breath and held the beaker up above the water. He took the cap off and closed his eyes. His hand quivered slightly in the air. In a sudden swift twitch his arm twisted and the pill slid out of the beaker and into the water, sinking down below the surface.

At first nothing happened. He watched the water with an intense pain in his eyes as the pill dissolved below the murky surface. But a rumbling grew. One by one bubbles rose up to the surface, and foaming froth began to spread wildly in all directions as it rose to the surface. The water seemed to boil intensely as the scientist watched it spread out over the entirety of the lake, far beyond his vision, in only a few moments.

He smiled grimly. The pill was working. The water was being purified. Relief and excitement began to wash over him, and his knees bent in and he fell to the water’s edge. He watched closely as the water foamed.

There was, however, the most indistinguishable aspect of this experiment. Every time previous had dealt with small quantities of water. In the end, the pills that worked all had the same results. The separation of the pollution and water. It seemed so simple and flawless, it never crossed his mind until that very moment when he knelt there watching the reaction spread and foam out across the water that there was something amiss in his calculations.

It was then that something unexpected caught his eye. An oversight of the smallest but most insurmountable measures. A thick smoke was coming off the surface of the water, containing the pollution that plagued the life of the lake. The smile wiped off of his face as he looked around the air to notice the smoke had filled all the air everywhere. He then realized that he had already began to breathe it and could feel it thickly running into his lungs as he began to cough.

He tried to stand up, but only fell down onto his side. He managed to crawl back away from the lake, trying cover his breath but it was useless. He made his way to the side of the rock, where he slowly became motionless and limp. He laid there until the smoke infested his body, killing him from the inside with a violent pain that caused his eyes to become red and watery.

There was a silence in the air after the old man had passed on. The water began to calm to a hue of blue and the smoke in the air began to dissipate. The scientist's body laid there by the lake, undiscovered at any point in time before he began to rot away next to the rock and fade into the ground.

It was many years later when a young girl came upon that rock, overrun with the roots of an apple tree that had grown around it. The lake and sky were blue and beautiful and the ground had begun to grow green with rampant grass all around. The young girl climbed into the branches to perch herself not too far up into the branches. She picked an apple and began to eat it. Her bites were large and thoughtless, and the crunch of her teeth seemed to echo throughout the air around her. She looked out towards the horizon where the water met the sky, smiling in simple thoughts.

She finished in just a short time, and tossed the thick core carelessly down towards the ground. It rolled down the side of the rock and was caught by the roots, as the water ebbed up slowly towards the apple and it began to oxidize and brown.

Born and raised in Western Massahcusetts, Josh Aubin is a writer and musician who currently lives in Seattle.