The Pygmy Giant

by Fiona Campbell

I sit here and the buildings burn around me and I wonder why I continue to write when I know no one will read my final words. My feet are bare and the pavement is gritty with sand and hot, like the summers of my childhood when we would hop from one foot to the other like lizards in the desert. I think perhaps I write because there is no one left to talk, to listen. They left many days before this, I was too old, too slow. Were the world as it once was I would have village children clustered around my thin ankles now. Villages that became cities that became rivers of rubble and screams.

There is no one left. Just me. For all I know I may be the last. And what will it all have been for? The day the babies started to die in their mother’s wombs there was chaos. So many lost lives. It swept across the world like a sandstorm of fear. In buses women doubled up in pain, in the streets their blood seeped into the cracks in the sidewalk. And after the horror of that first week, when all the babies in the world were lost before their first breath, we all went about our business with sickness in our hearts. We waited, of course we did. We waited for the pregnancies that never came.

And when we realised that it was really the end of our race, it was strange. People stood in the streets watching children play and tears rolled silently down their cheeks. We kind of just stopped, the world came to a standstill. We thought for the first time about what it was all for, why we were here…and what came after. I think I realise now, on this that will be my final day. We were meant to be the last ones, this was the only way we would wake up. So although I know that no one will benefit from my final words it has not been in vain, because as I sit here watching the world collapse around me, I finally understand.

We were meant to be the last, this is as it was meant to be. I have lived and now I will die and that is all there is and ever has been to understand.

Fiona Campbell only actually ever writes here; Open University and children take up all the rest of her time.