“One, two, THREE!”, her conscience yells. On three she jumps in the air and begins to flip backwards in a straight position. Two milliseconds later she assumes she hit a vertical body position in the air and so she begins to twist. Full twisting layouts are scary and the only place she'd ever do it is on a trampoline. She twisted a bit too early so her landing was a little off; but it’s okay because at least she’s still alive. She starts to cough and she realizes that must be a cue that it’s time to go in. She sighs, pulls up her shirt to cover her mouth and nose, and begins to climb out of her trampoline. She steps into her brand-new purple Vans. It’s dark out and a plane is flying across the purple sky filled with gray smoke. Planes to the young teenage girl are a real interesting thing. Planes are a reminder that there always is a place to escape the stressful city, whether it's another country or a completely different world. She stretches her arms out and goes on her tippy-toes as if she’s about to hug the sky. She starts to imagine stars in the sky, the kind of stars she sees in paintings and imagines when she reads books.The sky rejects her hug and so she walks away into her home, oblivious to the fact she stepped on several cockroaches and other insects that no one knows the names to.
Walking into the kitchen she begins to smell instant noodles cooking in the microwave and hears flies being swatted somewhere in the living room. Her mom is sitting on the table with her laptop watching the news next to the plastic tree that gives off a Wifi signal. Her mom hates laptops because they're bulky. But because she accidently dropped her VT500 Instant Update tablet a while ago (and broke it comepletely) she has to go back to using an old-style laptop. She looks up to see her daughter.
“Tired yet?” she asks.
“A bit. There’s a cockroach on your shoulder,” responds the girl. The mother sighs and calmly flicks off the cockroach. It lands on the table.
“That’s cute. It looks like a baby cockroach”, she says as she closes her laptop and inserts it in a purple silicone laptop sleeve. Without a moments hesitation the mother slams her laptop on the table, instantly killing the cockroach.
“Did you know they might have found a place for us?” says the mother. She grabs the cockroach and tosses it in the trash.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh! You know! This is all we talk about nowadays. This world no longer is a suitable place to live in and luckily space travel and accommodation has become a possibility! Water from Europa, oxygen from some planet that will be delivered from some sort of machine, and food made simply out of lab. It’ll be cheap and abundant!” She smiles and starts to open up her laptop.
“Mom, did we actually try and save the Earth? I mean, were we truly not aware of the patch of garbage the size of Texas in the ocean until last year? And how could we not have noticed all these animals going extinct before the cockroach infestation? And the asthma rates going up due to air pollution. Did we actually not know? Or did we turn a blind eye?”
“Sweetheart we did everything we could have done to save the Earth,” the mother says as she slides over her laptop to show the girl the new spaceship built for the middle-class to live in space.
“That’s what they wants us to think,” the girl whispers under her breath.
“It doesn’t matter anyway. Sooner or later we’ll be on our way to a more sustainable place. A new world we can call our own.”
“Are you sure we’re not just going around destroying life carelessly for our convenience?”
“Well, I mean, you gotta do what you gotta do. Hey look! What a gorgeous plane! It has purple headlights! Move the Wifi tree will you? It’s about to cover up the view.”
Wifi trees are nothing like the trees the girl sees in old movies and pictures. The leaves are made out of lime green plastic and the thin trunk is made of marooned-colored aluminum.Some sort of thing inside the tree gives off the Wifi signal. It stands at about five feet just to give it a sort of realistic look. The girl walks over to the tree and pushes it about a foot to the right. She thinks about what her mother said and tries to make sense of it. Afterwards she walks to the living room where her father is swatting flies.
“Stupid flies!” He smacks his hands across the wall killing two flies at once. The fly swatter lays at the ground broken in half.
"Haha! That's two!
“What did they ever do to you?” whispers the girl underneath her breath.
"Is that 6 on the floor? Add 2 to that and that's a total of 7! Honey! I just killed seven flies in less than 5 minutes!" her father yells.
" Eight," says the girl with a sigh.
Walking into the kitchen she begins to smell instant noodles cooking in the microwave and hears flies being swatted somewhere in the living room. Her mom is sitting on the table with her laptop watching the news next to the plastic tree that gives off a Wifi signal. Her mom hates laptops because they're bulky. But because she accidently dropped her VT500 Instant Update tablet a while ago (and broke it comepletely) she has to go back to using an old-style laptop. She looks up to see her daughter.
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