skit #72: something blue and useless

That era's great blue planet modeled asphalt oceans, automobiles grazing in lush pastures, cellular antennae groves, mountains of unrecycled post-consumer waste, badlands of monotonous habitations. That modern mankind did not live in dystopia, only its present. When its present passed, some new texture would clothe earth's curves, some new scar would scab earth's skin. The eternal Spring to which modern man acclimated eventually unsprung.

Doomsday evangelists and Mayan calendars enjoyed brief vindication prior to the indiscriminate mayhem ends-of-epochs tend to usher. Cereal crops withered under droughts. Oil reserves depleted. Natural disasters raged perniciously over unnatural landscapes. Wanton warring left the earth scorched and the winters nuclear. The common cold cashed its chips, making its abrupt exit along with billions of its hosts. Catastrophes erased all life between between Sydney and Calgary like a broad stripe of primer, turning everything earthly dead and gray.

Her people were once confident cities would stand again, eventually acquiescing to the reality of their bleak frontier. Refugees have been displaced from their homeland; Nomads have no homeland.

An ultraviolet dawn invisibly smiled upon Lucy, sweetly gracing her cheek with a cancerous kiss. She awoke, yawned through her pantyhose gas mask, and enjoyed her morning stretches. Hungry, she left her tent for the jetty to fish for breakfast.

Never did she expect to snag salmon, perhaps a fish stick or hot dog if lucky. She baited her line optimistically, jacketing a bent screw with the tantalizingly fluorescent nib of a yellow highlighter. She cast her spool of telephone wire as far as her atrophied arms would allow.

Viscous with crud and gunk, the river slipped over its unknown contents, like greasy fingers through unkempt purse: its morsels, its treasures, its trash. The yellow nib plumbed bravely into the river, into the opaque toxins in which even fluorescence could hide.

Lucy listened to the burbling river's muddy wisdom. She remembered shopping for bargains in the supermarket long ago with her mother. But now, she had no choices. The hook and river would agree upon what she deserved.

She reeled and found something: something too lustrous for a shell fragment or fishscale, something too ornate for biproduct from the ancient cosmetics factory decaying upstream, something too fragile to have survived river's toxicity and turbulence by its own, something unedible, something impractical, something improbable, something blue and useless. She placed it in her pocket. Of the things she found and kept were those she wanted not needed.

She would eat tomorrow. Today, she adored the bauble's absurdity.