Science isn’t optional.

Eryn Mei Peritz, United States

            They treat their home like a cornucopia of plenty; let earth be cast adrift in a blanket of ocean and forget about it. Don’t you see it? The oceans level the earth, ripping jagged gorges of land bit by bit, till only chalked-up debris is all that remains of what they can no longer call home.

            Watch as the seafarers rejoice and the albatross’ wings sing in the glint of the seas. As spans of feather slice through the smog, you too shall struggle to recall the familiarity of home.

            When they gasp for air, there will be no middle ground to reach for. They traded the bones of their home, the simplistic intrinsics, for infinite roads of infinite greed that drove them to the ends of the Earth. This time around, there will be no Noah’s Arc.

            1.4×1021kilograms of sea engulfing the entirety of their home, and no one gives a damn. They stare on ahead, envisioning the cushy folds of dollar bills dripping through their fingers like sand. They strove to cleave their future from the past, pitting land against the sea and sea against land though they grew up from the ground. But you and I both know home is a concrete abstraction, refusing to leave.

            Watch as their lips shrivel, turn blue, brine brimming to the tippity-top of their lungs, till they finally collapse. Yet still—their lips drip of the insatiable salivation and their lungs drink in finite abundances while ripping the lands’ heart from its channels, its bearings from its body.

            Castaways of the Garden of Eve, they conspired and coveted, thieved and seethed in the Milky Way, till the land bore its teeth and parted them in a sneer to jeer its final farewell: goodbye! goodbye! good riddance to the infamy that was formerly known as humanity!

Eryn Mei Peritz (丰春苹), 17, is co-editor-in-chief of her school’s literary magazine, Context, and was selected to attend the Alice Hoffman Young Writers Retreat in the summer of 2020. She has a fierce passion for novelty earrings and pom-pom tailed poodles (hers of course, included). She can most likely be found curled up with a cup of green tea and a good book. Her poem, “Won, Too,” and another one of her prose pieces, “Finally,” were also published in this issue of Aster Lit.