Rose Blumen ~

(Aïsshean)

I remember waking up on that morning like any other.

I dressed. I ate. I cheered on my conscientious sister heading to her university. I comforted my insecure younger one, and I teased our little brother.

Our parents outside of town for a while, I was keeping the home logistics steady.

Azzie & Ahhie went to their schools. Attie went to her medical university. I left home last, heading to work without any idea of what global changes would rain on us like cinders next.

~

The car bringing me to my industry forecasted good weather. Warm and dry, without storm in sight.

A normal day, without any fear from the sky. The times when our grandmother feared the bombs falling from the sky is far behind.

Humanity endures and thrives. Everything alive does. Grandma Natessh repeatedly told us that. She loved telling us frightening stories from her past.

From times of war, deepest despairs and brightest passions. She needed to tell us, to survive her scars.

No matter how many decades of peace had followed the quiet end of this last extensive war.

We live on, doing our best with what we have. I recall thinking that.

As I was heading toward my office, I recall hearing that a ionospheric storm had been noticed in another part of the world. It's far. So long it doesn't affect the climatic rhythms of the next four months, it doesn't matter much to me I thought.

We were sowing our new crops along the fields that covered the landscape.

I was happy to put my understanding and studies of agronomy and bioengineering to good use.

For the good of all humanity, we ought to turn even these deserts outside, into gardens someday.

Every year we grew one step closer, and this new year was meant to be good as well. Inch 'Allah.

And as abruptly as if a foreign bomb had coursed through the sky, which we thought was the explanation at first, all came to end.

~

On this morning, a white flash seemed to course through everything at once. No matter where, even through the walls.

Something felt ripped and dissolved away from me, as if my soul had just left me.

I fell on my knees, confused, ears ringing, vomiting suddenly and unable to keep any coherent string of words aligned in my thoughts.

I fell as if the roof had fallen over me.

And the lying or convulsing bodies of my colleagues around me did not help me think straight.

And then as I struggled to stand or recover my thinking, I heard the continuous screaming rising around me.

A detonation and more tremors made me fall again as a show of chaos began to rise.

I hallucinated heavily and I could tell, still dreadful that a part of my true self might have just been burnt and taken away from me.

I shivered, trembled, and moved very unsteadily toward the now broken door, to get away from this damaged building. I still thought then there had been an unexpected attack and that I needed to head to safety plainly.

I stepped around bodies seemingly starting to rot very unevenly.

I bumped against someone liquefying alive, staining and terrifying me. The yells continued to ring like city noises and chirps outside. I heard detonations of shots and more screams.

My head was feeling drunk and sleep depraved altogether, but still acting on instinct to survive whatever attack this was. I stumbled away from the building only to watch pillars of smokes carried by the winds.

I saw the colourful streams like an aurora borealis coursing like repeated waves over the late morning sky.

And my stunned mind began to realise, maybe, just maybe this wasn't a simple political war like so many priors in the past.

~

I could breathe, although it hurt inside. My heart felt as if it might break, but I was alive.

Many others around me didn't get that far. I could see now how much being still alive was already rare.

I recognised symptoms of chemical collapse. As some of my intelligence returned, I could begin to put a word or a theory over the atrocities I witnessed everywhere around me, and soon in every corner of the city.

Bodies rotting. Networking slimes growing. Mushrooms growing and rapidly sporulating. Microbiological explosions of activities like I could never have witnessed before. Our cells were collapsing in swift cascades, and others growing just as fast.

I realised something had gone horribly wrong and how much in danger I still was in, staying in this heavily contaminated zone, even though the reason remained unclear. The effects were beyond my reasons.

I began trotting away in the midst of a growing and widespread confusion. I needed to get out of here before whatever was in the air now really got a nasty grab on me.

I picked up a gaz mask and wore it before leaving the industrial site on foot, and left all my work to burn behind.

~

Sadly for me, I wasn't running away from a biohazard zone as much as I thought I might. The epicentre of things wasn't behind. And the further I headed into the collapsing town, the worst what I witnessed became.

Piles of dead bodies were crawling around the streets like slugs, gathering everything made from organic chemistry.

People were fighting with great firepower against these things and more, and were losing ground.

Flames and darker fumes were spreading fast through the entire city. People vomiting regularly were fleeing. Everyone was sick and struggling to stand, or to remain solid.

I saw a boy tripping and falling flat on the ground. His body exploded unnaturally like a ripe fruit on impact, staining everything with bloody tissues on a wide radius. As if he had fallen from much higher than foot level.

I kept walking in panic, now hearing the horrified screams from the child's parents.

In such a short time, everything we knew and counted upon simply died. It decayed.

The order. The rules of law, the rules of biology, the rules of society, the rules of knowledge and logic.

I felt that growing dread that we were falling into a reshuffling of known and unknown, as I made my way home in a daze.

Thankfully I made it back in one piece.

I reached the now damaged ruins of our home, which I had left merrily and pristine earlier this morning.

I felt that cold fear growing. Because I recognised the place, but not what really happened to it. New fissures were growing and weird lichens settling, the house recognisable but not its environment activity any longer.

I turned around, breathing painfully, watching the end still occurring.

Something wide just shifted, beyond what a pathogen could spread or a blast destroy. And now our environment, our world was no longer the same.

I could recognise some of the patterns I observed. The way green moulds spread over puddles under the sun, and black ones under shades. How tissues decomposed and cells membranes lost their coherence. How proteins were broken through stresses. It was a wider scale of stresses and strains.

Our resources will help us survive, but this sudden change would purge everything unable to protect itself or adapt in time...

A crisis I couldn't imagine was just beginning, and all I saw were the painful early signs. These hours across hellscape were the first rifts preceding a wide and possibly immense collapse. Something huge was happening.

My heart was beating too fast, reminding me to think back at my own scale of survival first of all.

I headed inside the house, and prayed for my family to return just as fine...

For a moment as I was still alone at home, I felt that weight of growing worry coursing through our time. A touch of hopelessness.

The white day had just come, and our world was now changing times.

~