Moonlight/Night on the Progress of Humanity

Light is a magical thing. It can highlight or hide flaws forever casting the world in ever-changing lights. At noon, the sun's glaring rays will show every flaw. The cracks in concrete, the shine on the edge of a dull blade. It’s utilitarian, revealing problems while you still have time to fix them. Sunrise and Sunset obscure what is wrong. It’s almost as if the warm light relaxed your eyes, letting them glide over imperfections. But Moonlight… moonlight is special. It romanticizes even complete destruction. Ruins turn to romantic, adventure around every corner, and even the worst problems seem distant and conquerable.

But even the Moonlight couldn’t mask the horror of this scene. It was a mound, taller than two men, of churned dirt. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was lying in that pit. A single pitiful wooden cross sat on the top. Two twigs lashed together. All that marked the countless emaciated who lay there.

Of course this wasn't the only pile. Three more formed a straight line, ringed with prints left from cat tracks. Strange, there aren’t many pieces of large equipment left, let alone gas to run them.

Kneeling at one of the piles was a man. Dressed in a tattered tweed coat, he knelt, hands clasped, teeth chattering, and murmuring under his breath. Poor sod, at least he was smart enough to get out of the cities, even if his hunger panged frame and burned hands told the stories of his struggles. He stood, walking towards the treeline. His steps were surprisingly steady considering his condition, his dress shoes make deep impressions in the damp earth. There was a faint trail he was walking towards. A few broken ferns most people would miss. The mud got thicker leaving deeper imprints as the beech and maple forest was replaced with trembling aspens and willows. A trickle emerges from the slight slope of the hill, and you can see narrow footprints of bare feet paralleling the tiny stream. The aspen leaves tremble, their silver underside flashing as they twirled in the wind. What was that? A whiff of smoke. He turns his head and starts jogging along the tracks. They veer to the left and he follows. The scent is stronger now. The smell of damp wood smoking and something cooking.

A light up ahead. Warm and comforting it beckons. He's running now and his teeth have stopped chattering and he's breathing in heavy gasps, his hot breath wisping in the cold night air. He's almost there and THUD!

“MOTHERFUCKER!” his ankle twisted in an unnatural angle, caught in a lifted maple root. “This blasted tree why’d the fucking thing have to be here dammit.” he hissed between this clenched teeth.

“Maybe because it’s a fertile patch of Earth and the tree simply needed a place to grow.” a mirthful femine voice echoes through the forest. “Or perhaps the entire world decided to conspire against you, planting that tree fifty years ago waiting for this very day.” She steps out from behind a maple, arms crossed, her brown skin shimmering in the moonlight. She crouches down by the man, who was still holding his ankle tight. “You look terrible.”

The man’s voice strained. “Please help me.” She smiles again, threads her arm under his and pulls him up.

“What’s your name oh careless one?” his face pulls into a grimace.

“Evan.”

“I’m Ehawee. How did you trip with all this light? You should really watch where you're going.” Shuffling into the small camp, Ehawee gently lays Evan down in front of the fire then walks over to her pack slumped against a large beech. “Where do you come from Evan?” He didn't respond. Turning she could see him squeezing his eyes shut, his entire body tense as he tried to fight the pain. She slides a piece of umber bark from a bundle, walks over and sets a hand on his shoulder. “Open your mouth and chew this, it’ll help with the pain.” She stands up and starts jogging towards the little stream. On her return Evan has sat up, leg propped up, and throws another log on the fire.

“Thank you for your help.” he grunts.

“No need to thank me, put this on your ankle.” she passes him a wet cloth, cold from the creek water.

“What are the mud balls that were in the fire?”

“Cattails. They’re a bit fibrous but edible.”

“How are you out here?” his voice was low straining with despair. His back hunches, shoulders trembling and head hangs low in grief.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re less than a mile from a mass grave, smiling and laughing. How can you be so carefree when the world is burning?” Tears slid silently down his face. Little rivers shone in the moonlight as he turned his head away from the fire. Ehawee sat for a moment, contemplating.

“Would you rather me be sad? Yes those people are dead, but few of them were ever truly alive. Most would’ve lived out the rest of their life unfulfilled and contributing to the destruction of their Mother Earth. Those people-”

“DON’T YOU DARE DISCOUNT THEM.” his voice rang through the grove, echoing off the hillside. “Every single life was precious. They starved while you sit here with plenty to eat. What if the roles were reversed?! If you were someone in one of those cities, slowly dying while someone else sat in the forest living like a queen? I can only assume you learned your skills because of where you were born. But what about them? They didn’t deserve to die. What makes them different from you?” his voice breaks. “Why won’t you help them?” Ehawee slowly raises her head, leveling her piercing eyes at Evan’s crumpled form.

“What would you have me do Evan? There will always be injustice. I can’t feed them all. The white man did this to himself, becoming distant from the Earth and helpless. You mined the Earth soil, destroying what you had. Are you really surprised it only took one solar flare to send your already destabilized society off the edge?”

“So people should go back to the dark ages? We should throw away all the progress we’ve ever made to live out in the woods like you. That could never sustain everyone, the land would run out eventually.” Silence hangs in the air, and Ehawee turns to the fire.

“Do you know why every civilization has fallen?” her voice is quiet, barely more than a whisper.

“Entropy. They don’t adapt fast enough and are overtaken by someone else who will.”

“That’s only half the story. It’s true the world refuses to stay the same, but more than that it’s about the nature of power.” She selects a stick from the pile drying by the fire. “If I try to force or coerce you into doing what I want how will you react?” she turns again, looking Evan in the eyes this time.

“I would stop you.”

“Exactly. Every civilization has been built off the labor of others. There's always power-hungry individuals forcing their will on others. Even in democracy the many subjugate the few. A large civilization cannot fulfill all peoples desires, therefore, they're enforcing their will on someone. It’s why a utopian society is impossible.”

“Limited government. It provides security and nothing else.”

“And when has that ever worked out? People would resort to violence to resolve feuds. There's always a system trying to enforce justice, otherwise there would be chaos.” The fire crackles, and Ehawee rolles the baked cattail roots off the coals, and tosses the stick into the fire.

“So what does that have to do with you refusing to help people?” Evan says, glaring at her.

“Simply your society was doomed to collapse. I’m helping where I can, that's why I’m here. You can only save the drowning man who swims toward you. Peace comes when you’re in harmony and working together instead of trying to fight off other people. People are imperfect, and everything they create will have some sort of flaw. It’s why we must trust the natural systems. To learn from the plants and animals who’ve lived longer than us and have living figured out.” Evan knit his brow, giving her a concerned and quizzical look.

“So we’re all supposed to live in harmony with the Earth and never aspire for something more? We’re supposed to look at the stars and never try to reach them? That doesn’t sound much like living to me.”

“How will you reach them? By stealing from the Earth to build rockets to find what's beyond? You accuse me of being heartless for not helping all of your people, an impossible task might I add, while it was your people who were content to watch the crises of others. Tragedies and even genocides the white men knew about and did nothing to help. The Yemen crisis, the Siege of Sarajevo, the government even turned refugees from your border and yet you try to blame me?” The silence was deafening. Even the fire seemed to quiet.

“Thank you for helping me, and I’ll try to repay you. It's just so fucking- broken. All we wanted was something greater and somehow we destroyed what we had. There's got to be a better way. Were we simply meant to be hunter-gatherers for eternity? We did so much in only two thousand years and know we're going to lose it? This can’t be what humankind is destined to be. It’s not right.” His head fell into his too-scarlet hands. His once shiny Oxfords were covered in mud, his exposed skin covered in lacerations from his run that had only just started to clot.

The campfire glows, rendering the moonlight invisible. The pair sits next to each other, the mystical night soiled by haunting questions... 238,900 miles away, a flag floats motionless. The remainder of the American dream, and a reminder of the civilizations that once stood. Maybe one day people will once again reach for the stars. Perhaps they’ll find that flag, way up on the Moon and wonder how it got there. Hopefully, they’ll get farther than us.