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An eighteen-year-old elder sister starts off her morning, unknowing. She stares up at the corroded ceiling at 03:00 A.M. The ceiling is a general concoction of dark yellow and green towards the middle and has a drooping center where the ceiling light should be; but it doesn’t show now. The world is only beautiful in darkness lately. A sharp intake of breath later, and the air she swallows immediately gives her a mild affliction of the lungs. She places her feet on the ground, forgetting again that the land she stands on is chronically covered with a thin layer (though increasingly thickening) of water. She orders the curtains to open, and there’s nothing but stars in the sky and a new moon. She commands that they close again.

Eyes blaze with contempt at the main light switch with a grimace. Instead, she takes her milder flashlight and uses it. Even with such stubborn insistence on darkness for so long, she still bumps into objects before she heads off to run a bath.

“Run water at sixteen degrees Celsius and fill the bathtub a quarter way,” she yells at her bathtub.

Ever since The Great Tipping Point, baths aren’t so soothing anymore. She puts her toes into the bath, and she winces not because the water is slightly too hot, but because the water slightly burns and eats at the flesh more than the last time she took a bath, which was a week ago. Showers were the worst idea because the water would touch her eyes and mouth.

The young lady puts on her winter sports clothes, as there was a time that she was a runner’s athlete and even joined a club at her school. Just from the wet acrid scent, she knows it’s going to rain today. An additional shield mask goes on her face; she puts on some gloves, shades and Wellington boots. She covers her hair with an exaggeratedly broad sun hat; she looks ridiculous, but the cause is so dire.

Her baby sister is lying down so tranquil and still, like a doll. Just like her and her mother, the little sister has large almond-shaped eyes and a narrow face with a thick shrub of hair on her head, as cute as a giraffe calf. The so-called “baby giraffe” is supposed to be five years old, but the way she is swaddled in thin and miniscule blankets, she looks a lot younger lately. The older sibling kisses her baby sister’s forehead on the other side of their room, turns her air conditioning on to the coldest setting, grabs her burden of a backpack and flashlight, and leaves the building. The heat is very apparent to her, and she checks her phone, only to find out that it is 04:12 A.M and that it is 46 degrees Celsius outside. She sighs, holding out her flashlight and walking under the very luminescent strobe lights, staring at the stars for as long as she can. “These lights always work like they are brand new, the damned solar-powered things,” she reckons and mutters maledictions to herself. The air outside is worse than it is inside. Burns more and is stuffier.

There are flowers everywhere, blooming fresh in the middle of summer. Although they’re not bright and colorful, they have many distorted shapes, and their petals boast different shades of brown and even black. Their existence is vile but efficient, and they have enough pollen in them to kill a small elephant with hay fever. People down the street are wearing suits or pantsuits in corroded corporate buildings typing away at their laptops so early in the morning. Unlocking their office buildings, walking around briskly and busily as if the corporate world mattered anymore. She wonders why she is still trying to go to school as well, but her feet still move onward.

It’s just a ten-minute walk but she feels the lactic acid in her legs and her knees buckle. Her mouth is painfully dry, though for a while now there has been perpetual saltiness in her mouth regardless. She sits outside on the bench, realising she has come too late; all seats in shaded areas have been taken by other students. She finds herself trying to study, ignoring the large possibility that there might not be a future where she can write her final examination. She stares at her hands instead, so brutally calloused. Trying to bend her fingers hurts more severely than arthritis; she must hold onto things so tightly for them to barely be in her grasp. Even her pen, which drops at every second.

At 5:30 a.m., the sun begins to emerge, just above the horizon. It has barely touched the surface of the land and there are plenty of heavy, cumulonimbus clouds blocking it, yet its heat is enough to scald the skin to a level that feels like a third-degree burn. She immediately takes out her metal and zinc galvanised umbrella. It feels heavy, and she needs to hold the umbrella with both hands to keep it up. Not much learning will be done today, she knows. Even as she hoists the umbrella up, the heat of the sun rays through the clouds and the pungent air is so hot that she feels as if she is bleeding just beneath her skin. She second guesses attending school at all, that maybe she should leave before the sun sets the land ablaze when it has fully risen.

As she ponders, a boy from her grade suddenly drops to the ground, having unsettling seizures. His eyes bulge and turn red, blood vessels popping all at once. He coughs out a dark yellow substance, probably bile, and his body is predisposed to hop and jump as if electrocuted. After some time, he stops moving. He died from something; there are so many dormant diseases that have awoken that most health professionals cannot catch up.

His quickened rigor mortis was cue enough for her to ditch school and head home. As the scintillating clouds grow darker, the old teenager grows more in pain. Although there is a black shadow cast under her by her metal umbrella, like the shadow cast by a black heron’s wings which turns day into night, the drizzle seeps through the small faults in her outfit. The small strip of skin exposed by the disjoining of her socks and tights, the slight slip of skin between her turtleneck and her mask, the crevices between the hairs in her scalp; that’s where the rain bites. She knows when she gets home, those parts of her skin will look severely bruised.

She stops where there is about a four-minute walk home, already extremely thirsty. She opens her bag and brings out a flask of water. Going to the best shade she can find, a place the rain hasn’t hurt yet, she removes her mask. There is only a bad tingling sensation from the backwash of drizzle on her face, like ants are nibbling on it. She sips the water, grateful that her parents invested in a top of the range water filter at home, or else she would be drinking water. She checks her phone at 06:01 a.m., 55 degrees Celsius.

A notification from her house pops up on her screen silently and aggressively. It reads:

“!!ALERT!! GAS LEAK!! ALERT!! GAS LEAK!! EVACUATE BUILDING!!”

The poor girl’s little sister comes to mind in an instant. She runs home, dropping her umbrella and bag, letting the drizzle prickle her skin like tiny thorns. With sporadic jittering, she bursts the front door of her parents’ house open; a minute and thirty-eight seconds after she receives the message. She runs upstairs, and grabs her fragile little sister, roughly. All the young lady can hear is the sizzling spraying sound of gas, and she knows the invisible enemy is only going to worsen. She is so frantic that she loses her bearings. Running downstairs, she feels weaker, and by the time she gets down she is barely walking. She sees the door in front of her but is now traipsing like a fatigued marathon runner. Using all her strength, she turns the knob down, and she lunges forward, just enough to barely open the door. She takes in the air outside so vibrantly and proudly, to the point where it feels fresh. The rain is heavier now, but she doesn’t notice.

It occurs to her that her little sister’s whole body feels ice-cold.

It drops her heart down to her feet. She turns her sister around, so they face each other. Tears try to form under her eyes, but it’s too hot.

Her baby sister’s mouth is smeared in dried blood. She died a long time ago, from something.

The rain will not let the eighteen-year-old girl mourn her baby sister. It scorches her skin, such that she must find shade under a random tree to survive. She knows she only has five minutes to stay under the tree, or else the rain might kill her. The young lady hoists her sister up and supports her back and neck gently on the trunk of the tree. She wipes her baby sister’s mouth, trying to clean out the blood as much as possible. The teenager doesn’t know if this supposed disease is contagious, but her sister is dead, two weeks after her parents died. She doesn’t care about the contagion of the disease.

She is doomed. She succumbs to it like one would surrender their arms to the deep waters when they drown, she surrenders her arms to the clouds; leisurely escaping the shade, into the eternal ruin she and her recent ancestors created.

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