After The Aguacalypse

They gathered in the shade of the empty building below the double amber curves. It had been a long, hard hunt and they were tired, but resting there, protected from the heat that blazed outside, they felt better. As the younger children skinned the pelts from the giant rodents the group had captured, some of the Middle Years gathered around the Teaching Elder as she told them the legends of The Ones Who Came Before.

“They could touch the sky. They had dominion over the waters. When they hungered they would rub their fingers over a magic machine that they held in their hands and soon a meal would be brought to them.”

The youngsters sighed contentedly, dreaming of even a small part of such bounty.

“When the sun scorched the land they turned a circle on their walls and their dwellings became cool. They feared no animal and made no sacrifice so that the giant metal monsters would not come in the night and take their children. In those times the giant metal monsters did as they were bid.”

“But Teaching Elder,” interrupted one. It was D’Nim, the boldest and brashest of the Middle Years. He was always the first to climb on a giant roach’s back and wrestle it into submission if there were no other meat to be found. If he survived, he would one day be chief. “If The Ones Who Came Before had all these things, worked all this magic, what happened? Why are we not like them? Why must we live the way we live now?”

“Oh, D’Nim,” said the Teaching Elder, shaking her head. “It is a lesson for all of us. They had everything and yet that abundance is what destroyed them. They choked their rivers with poisons. The blackened their skies oil. But most of all, they grew soft and contented and their decadence lead to the Great Reckoning.”

“But how?” D’Nim persisted. “You always tell us of the Great Reckoning, but what brought it about? What made them so weak that the Bad Things were able to take control?”

The Teaching Elder sighed. She knew he could no longer shield them from the horrors of the past. She sat on the long raised altar, under the pictures of breaded chicken parts and sandwiched cow patties, and reveled the terrible truth of how it all fell apart for The Ones Who Came Before.

“No society can survive, nor does it deserve to,” she began, “when it reaches the level where its members labor on lists of where to get heated bread with avocado smeared on it.”

THE END
(or is it just the beginning?)