Posts Tagged Gaia
Sighs Matter
Posted by mirandainnes in Writing on April 4, 2012
‘They jab and sting like swarming hornets, they scar and stab, infecting my skin with weeping sores and suppurating boils. No matter what I do — spew hissing lava to swallow towns, cough tsunamis, roll obliteration across entire coastlands, hammer cities with earthquakes, bury them in mud, incinerate them, smash them — still they take one more, they always want just one more. Busy, mindless of the hell they make, they look away, ignore my warnings.
ENOUGH.
I have helped these creatures grow, I have given them life. I can diminish them. The greedy, reckless, harmful ones. I gave them antibodies, killer-T’s to scavenge free radicals. To protect myself I must create killer-T’s. To miniaturise them, disable them.’
She sighed as she spun again, and released in that sigh:
A minimising molecule, targeting despots and sadists, wife-beaters and bankers.
A magnetic chemical, tracking the metallic smell of avarice and cruelty, discovering every averted eye, every murder by commission or omission, every act of gargantuan greed that left a nation starved.
A grief-seeking drone, that locked onto the blinkered conscience ignoring rapine, genocide, torture.
In ratio to the hurt they caused, she made the perpetrators shrink.
They learned too late that sighs matter.
Overnight it became apparent that the corner offices, the penthouse suites, the executive jets, the lakeside villas were all empty of their owners.
Conscientious cleaners inadvertently vacuumed their employers along with cocaine and dog hair. Anxious ministers, all unwitting, trod on their tiny, naked superiors while searching for them. Pedigree cats ate them, trophy wives sat on them, the children of privilege flattened their fathers and occasionally their mothers beneath skateboards and rollerskates.
Arms factories fell silent, wars ceased, the weak, the poor, the meek no longer lived in fear. There was enough for everyone.
She smiled as she spun.