Free Age of Blight by Kristine Ong Muslim

when the Builders walked ahead of us, we no longer considered it to be belittling.

    Time passed, and the valley was now a bustling metropolis. An atrium enclosed by a glass dome filtering UV rays served as the Builders’ command center. I worked with them now, on their payroll, as a sort of emissary, a token intermediary. I was well compensated for performing easy tasks.
    At the entrance to the Builders’ command center was a translation of the first of our nine sacred stones. The Builders must have found it quite important to commemorate what was written on the first sacred stone, the one that chronicled our beginnings. Now written in the language of the Builders, the story of my people was etched in a large metal plate. It said,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Do you see now what has become of us? When you first found us, we were swarthy and inelegantly intact—our horns and hides bristling in place, our hooves not yet scored and bloodied by a hundred different splinters, our quiet manifold darkness tucked away from sight. That was before an iron-laden rock roughly a mile in diameter decimated the area of the tropical forest we called home .
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The blast razed the trees, turned them into supplicants that brooded as they circled the periphery of the crash site, now a dumb and faceless crater lake cupping algae-ridden water. What once were trees became stunted wooden figures bending toward the direction of the crater, as if they ended up worshipping whatever it was that had killed most of them. And if you look at the not-quite-trees closely enough, you might notice how they twitch and flinch and rustle their phantom branches bearing phantom leaves—all these subtle motions taking place even in the absence of wind .
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Some of us died. The ones that survived were those that could mimic what passed for dead. The ones that flourished were those that resembled the rough beasts of summer—the restless and the languorous, the reckless and the selfish, those with tough hides allowing for elevated thresholds of pain. They entered the cities and mingled with the two-legged ones, the ones that learned long ago to stop walking on all fours, to covet ever so strongly what others have, to always take more than what was needed .
    The remaining elders were made comfortable, of course. The Builders made sure of that while they razed the valley and relentlessly carved the first layer of an open-pit mine at the edge of what was once the forest sheltering the rough beasts of summer. With butlers, chefs, and health-care professionals at their beck and call, the elders were each provided with well-furnished, temperature-regulated quarters in the residential skyrise. They occupied the ones on the west side, the ones sporting the widest balconies and walls laden with a dizzying ladder array of hydroponics-grown vegetables—an addition I suggested because I knew it would please my people.
    The balcony railings were gilded and glared harshly under the sun. I made a mental note to have those replaced with wrought iron railing as soon as possible.
    I read yesterday how the Builders wrote about us in the history books. The books were lavishly illustrated, complete with systematically labeled interior plates. The different areas of the valley were assigned as Grid 1, Grid 2, and so on. They even gave new names to my people’s magic charms. The Builders called them many such names, the likes of archeocyathids, trypanites, edrioasteroids, and petroxestes—all under the chapter entitled Fossils .

The Quarantine Tank

    I n the chemical plant right across your grandfather’s fields of lavender, there is a gleaming containment vessel that serves as a quarantine tank. The tank is angular when viewed from the outside. But