“Now where is Kara? KARA! It’s time, honey, we have to go or we’ll miss our connection. KARA!” Kara’s father shaded his eyes and searched the lush landscape for her.
“Let’s just leave her here,” Kara’s older brother, Jonathan, commented in his normally negative teenage way. “She doesn’t want to go anyway, so let her stay.”
“No one asked for your opinion,” Anne, the children’s mother, replied. “Take your baby sister aboard and get her strapped in. She doesn’t cry when you do it.” She turned to her husband. “Where do think Kara’s gone to, Walt?”
Walt sighed. “You know. The same place she always goes.”
Anne nodded. “Kara’s really taking this move hard. I thought she would get over it. I hoped so anyway. She doesn’t want to leave her home. It’s the only one she’s ever known.”
Walt smiled. “It’s home to all of us, Anne. But we have to move. It’s time.”
“I know. Well, you better go find her. It’s getting late.”
“Yup.” Walt walked off into the woods, heading for Kara’s favorite spot. A gentle bend with a slight waterfall in the twisting little creek not far from their house. Her nature retreat. Her secret place.
And there she was. Sitting on a rock on the mossy bank, watching the foam and listening to the gurgle of water at the base of the shallow waterfall.
“Kara. Kara, sweetie, we have to go. It’s time. We talked about this. We can’t stay. No one can stay anymore.” Walt squatted on the opposite side of the creek across from her. “We have to move on.”
Kara’s cheeks were tear-stained. “Can’t we just fix it? Make things good again, healthy and clean?”
Walt sighed. They had been over this a million times. “No, Kara, the planet is too far gone. The air pollution is so dense now, it’s hard to breath. The temperatures are too extreme in winter and summer to survive. Oceans have swallowed up the coastlines, as the polar caps melt. We’re desperately overpopulated, and buried in garbage from too many people. Storms keep increasing in severity, and the ozone has become too thin to protect us.”
Kara trailed her finger in the water. This forest was one of the few places relatively untouched yet. It had once been Alaska, frozen and snow-covered, but now was warm and green. But not for long.
“All we can do,” Walt continued, “is migrate to new worlds, clean, spacious worlds. And try, this time, to keep them that way.”
Kara looked up at her father. “Will there be places like this?”
“I’m sure there will. Lots of them. Let’s go; we don’t want to miss our rendezvous with the mother ship taking us to our new home.” He lifted Kara across the little stream. “Our new, green adventure.”
They walked hand in hand out of the forest, and Walt boosted her up the rocket’s ladder. Kara looked back once and whispered, “Good-bye, earth.”
Rod Drake has had stories posted in Flashes of Speculation, Flashing In the Gutters, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward, Fictional Musings and AcmeShorts. Originally from the Midwest, he now lives and writes in Las Vegas.
You always read stories or watch movies from the perspective of people decades or centuries after Earth has been abandoned. It’s not often that you see one from the perspective of the refugees themselves. It reminds me a little bit of When Worlds Collide.