I really should edit this and finish it.

A year after the world ends, unnamed female and her brother, Lucres, as well as their parents live better than they ever had before, but in a world where life may not be worth living for so much longer.

Everyone around me worries “what will happen when our food supply depletes?” But I’m thinking to myself, “what can I do to change this?” I’m no scientist, I have three weeks of AP Biology under my belt, as well as the standard biology from freshman year, and a bit of chemistry and physics tucked in around the corners. I guess I should have chosen AP Physics instead of Biology, because there isn’t anything left alive here or anywhere. People are eating other people, and suddenly pet shops and kennels can’t keep dogs and cats in stock. They’re the hot item. My family doesn’t eat any of that, yet, but we sell food to others. My father was a grocer before, and we have chickens and things. Rather than eat all of the food our family sold before, my dad figured out that animals are far more lucrative, because the cans of string beans and past-due-date soups don’t breed like a rabbit does. I am okay with selling the squirming creatures to hungry humans, because I know that when the squirmers run out, they’ll be trying to break in and steal our cans of food. And then they will break in and steal Lucres because he is chubby, then dad, then mom, then me. I am small with thick bones and thin skin. I used to be Lucres size until my rations were quartered and his halved. I’ve suddenly become very proud of myself because I was a fat, ugly teenager. Now I am a skinny, ugly teenager, but not like the other girls who are still alive and not married and pregnant (that doubles your rations) at fifteen. I am content to die of hunger because I know I had a life time of cheese burgers and animal-style fries in fourteen years, much more than the babies who grow up with perpetual coughs and raspy voices from the smoke-drenched air. They will be lucky if people feed them before they are sent to slaughter and eaten for nourishment as other sources are depleted. But maybe I am wrong and all the little babies will find a string-bean factory and live to have their own children before they have to start eating each other.

If we last till then. People these days have bad attitudes and worse sense. Scientists are scoffed at when they ask for food-supplies so they can live through the long and grueling hours of working over microscopes in empty laboratories. The government doesn’t fund anyone anymore except the secret city under the ground where the rich and fat are kept with plentiful stores of not-expired soup cans. Personally, I have always had the presence of mind to admire the scientists, and I heard one speaking on the news, right before the tv was taken away, and he appealed to the public to convince our corrupt (and mostly dead by now) governors to fund research. He had so much passion and hope, which is when I started to half my quartered rations and hoard them in a place my father won’t find.

Pathetic as it is, I am sure that if I can save enough, I will be able to make the journey to the labs down nine miles from my house, by foot, and live with the scientists. They are peaceful and rational. They may eat people, but they cook them first and strip them of the scarred and speckled skins they used to wear so that nobody suspects the Meat Surprise is actually quite normal and popular amongst the growing bands of cannibal-nomads and other company this ashen world keeps now that the sun is covered thick with smog and smoke.

I will bring them cans of vegetables to clear the meat-haze and contribute my share of strength and knowledge so we can together take our flesh-cutting tools and turn them up to the skies to scrape bits of smoke away until the sun shines through and plants return. I think there must be a plan, I think that either the scientists are trying to grow plants with hot-lamps, or the scientists are trying to stop others from using smog-creating earth-killing hot-lamps so the world can heal all on its own.

But there is one thing I won’t do, and that is eat another person. I saw it happen at school one time, a bunch of starved, full-crazed kids with make-shift weapons chased a fat girl down the hall and they were taunting her, but not with the usual comments. They were laughing and telling her she was so popular now, who knew the end of the world would make handsome boys like themselves “chubby-chasers.” She was chubby, they were chasing. And I was watching with big saucer eyes that filled my face, and tried to pinch my cheeks in so they wouldn’t remember how thick I used to be.

That was the second-to-last day of school as we know it because the next day they attacked the principal, and none of the fit, young teachers who still volunteered felt safe anymore. All the old ones had died of sickness or coldness or acheyness or fatal whineyness. The young are mostly the last left, and we consider ourselves lucky to be alive. While our parents tut-tut that we never had a chance to weigh three hundred pounds and go to Disneyworld in Florida, we think that no rules and anarchy suit ourselves well. This is the environment we were born to live out our last days in, and the taste of freedom peppers every stolen limb that dead teacher’s corpses are missing in fully operational morgue-malls where bodies are sold to the highest bidder, and riots frequently break out when the steady supply of bodies dwindles. The riots cure this very quickly and everyone leaves for home satisfied by having brutally murdered half the crowd bidding on a particularly large specimen who would have been repulsive then, and delicious now.

But I didn’t start off this story meaning to tell you about the people see around you. Because anybody reading this will know what the world is like and that I am a very sheltered, lucky girl. The end of the world made the poor and ugly rich and pretty, while the rich and beautiful shriveled like flowers missing sunlight as well as botox, capitalism and advil of course. I started this with a bold statement reflecting my peculiar upbringing as an optimistic realist. I want to change the world before we eat our plate of humanity and then everybody dies and there are no scientists left to cure the Earth of smog.

That’s why I store my food, because I know eventually I am going to die, but that with my final days I will journey to the science post of Southern California with food and a skinny body to offer the scientists there. Maybe I will invite them back to my place and we can kill my family and live off of whatever is left to our names. Lucres would be excited, he always wanted to meet someone on tv, and in the end, most scientists dominated the talk-shows with large and angry speeches that we were all bringing hell on Earth (they had sounded a bit like Born-Again Christians towards the end, but I want to justify that their’s was the program first to be cut, and that I supposed even the damned atheists were trying their hardest to win over the support of the still-majority of People Who Did Not Give A Damn If The World Was Ending Because God Would Save Them Anyways)

The time for me hasn’t come yet though, not until Lucres is eaten and even the rabbit population has been halved then quartered then halved again. I'll have to leave behind my belongings and belonging to this family in order to put myself at the peril of a nine mile stretch stadning between me and destiny. Then I'll make plans and carve away my mark on this planet, while I still can, and before the smog rains down and covers anything I build anyways.

But that time, my time is coming, and its coming soon.
finis