Dream in a Petri Dish

Thunder rumbles over an endless expanse of the grey country. 

A tepid swath of black rain morosely creeps under the brooding sky, thumping across the balding hills and dripping into the squalid cell blocks roughly lathered with cracked cement, pulling new stripes of brown onto the muck and rot that stuck to its walls. 

A diminutive form of a boy is seen within such a cell, kneeling beneath a flimsy umbrella. The boy stays stock-still, unaware of the dark drops collecting at the edge of the umbrella and plopping into his camera bag. Amidst the soft wash of mist and spray, his calm focus held unbroken on an open petri dish in his hand. Moments pass, with months of work embedded upon this sliver of a heartbeat—and nothing happens. 

A long bated breath hisses free, followed by a groan, a stretch, and a muted clatter. The petri dish breaks and instantly dissolves into the wet soil. And for a moment, the boy blearily stares at the ground, deeply inhaling the sour petrichor released. 

His mother is right, the boy thinks while quietly nursing his pride. He pulls his bags close away from the black rain, and seals them one by one. Rebirthing a culture of life is much harder than he had expected. What troglodytes his ancestors must have been, to have dared ignored nature’s tumultuous pleas for reason!

He shook his head angrily. Grandpa’s generation loved too much of the wrong things. A hot tear wells up in his vision as he trudged back towards the bunker. Grandpa himself had a selfish growth drowned out the tune of logic, unending that necessity of balance for him. For his family. For all living things.

He clenches the umbrella harder to quell his shaking hands. Humanity’s joyride in the vehicle of consumerism had gathered untenable inertia. The passengers on the ride never really questioned the drivers, not even when the train wreck came. Not even when the last bitter tastes of destruction had burnt their world’s senses black.

Beauty ends in the face of unending developments signed and traded like playing cards.

Mother’s generation began losing the beauty of sight and sound.
And then his generation had arrived, to a land with little more than waste.

“You can’t miss what you’ve never had,” grandpa had said. The boy shudders, remembering how his tongue thickened in a rage that filled his entire core. What of the myriads of children's stories depicting fields with rich air and naturally full soil?

He stops in his tracks and takes off his mask, his senses filling with a whirling staleness mixed with acrid air. His generation has lost more than he could bear!

Sighing, he pulls up his mask and walks on. The dream to realize the culture of nature still stands. With his help— with his best efforts, no matter how small, he will help bring this ecological wasteland to breathe life.

The sky darkened with a dust-storm. 

but I had the right tools to brighten it. 

I focused on the singular light source— a solar lamp permeating sickly yellows through the thick haze. As the  textures suddenly emerged, 

and carrion birds lifting away from the carcass of a wild ox.” “Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends  in part upon the myth-?making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences ” 

“greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.