Addictions creep in on us like ants in the night. Red ants which give the signal to bite only when they have the body covered. We used to put ash from the fire around our house at night, to seal ourselves off from the red ants. But now it is years later, and I understand that we invited them in. They came to us to show us, how we were. How our gin cravings and our next cigarette cravings choke us in the night.
 
I don’t want to wait, for some stranger to approve the scripts I write before they are shown to the world. We don’t want to wait, for the black jacketed white men of the world to hear us, and pull us through their paradigms.
 
We know the world is dying. We can hear it in our coffee cups in the morning. We can hear it in the crackle of our cigarettes. We know that we don’t want to be smokers. But we want the next cigarette. Like the CEO who knows, he doesn’t want his children to inherit a charcoal world. But he wants the next deal. He wants it bad, like the red ants want our blood in the night.
 
My dreams eat me. I see my river, choked with plastic bags. I see the paper, reamed and jacketed, trees shredded and refined into black and white environmental reports that doom our forests, our rivers, our stormy skies. Or those other skies, that seem to have no storm, no fight left in them. Crops, swindled by rain that was supposed to come from somewhere further north, only it can’t come from there any more, because the trees that were there have given up the fight. I reach for another puff of a tobacco wish fulfillment, and know that all across the peninsular, and further upwards into the desert lands and beyond, cars fart their defeated sighs, factories squeeze diseased feces into the night. And conscience attacks all at once, like red ants in the dark
 
I see the children’s dreams, their words being neatly sewn up by the voices of their elders, who have left them no hope to speak out. No hope of being heard. The image of elephants running, one of the saddest sights of the world. Elephants running with their tails shrunk against their sphincters. Knowing the suffocation of a constricted landscape. Sighing their deep infra sound sighs, hearing throttle engines and mistaking that sound for the throb of machine guns.
 
In the south they are waiting for thunder. For the comfort of the rains their grandmothers had. When it comes, their crops shudder to the ground, gone. In the north, the rains don’t seem to stop. The weather doesn’t play along, in the capitalist game show. Wishes don’t turn to water. Water can’t be wasted. So even tears don’t come, and parents console themselves that at least the children have stopped crying.
 
In the middle of the night, a marketing manager for Coca Cola chokes on his tie in his dream. He sees how tons of water are mixed, every day with tons of sugar, and how that sugar was made by thirsty reeds pulling water from the earth’s secret savings. He wakes in the night, thirsty from the wine of the night before. He stumbles from his bed as his wife is sleeping, he turns on the tap, and water flows from it, soothing his mouth and his smoking brain. He goes back to sleep, and in the morning his coffee tastes the same again. As he gets into his car to get to work, he notices for the first time the small shrub next to his car. How beautiful it is, with perfect independent leaves. He remembers how he felt when he saw his daughter’s small fingers for the first time. He makes a note to find out what species it is. How it got there. How it continues to exist, so miraculously, while he ploughs through traffic. At work he is consoled: his company is launching a new social responsibility programme to alleviate poverty and provide education for young people. Reaching into the community. This is what makes it worthwhile, staying where he is. Providing meaning in his day. By the time he comes home in the evening, and his wife is distant, and his son’s asthma seems to have improved, he knows, he knows that he is making a difference. He’ll give up smoking soon. He can see it is doing no good. He is ok, we are all doing ok, he tells her. We are doing ok.

And So the Globe Warmed

Some time around the beginning of the 21st century, things began to really hot up. It was the hardest punishment to accept. No one could bear it. It was gradual at first, and then, like AIDS, it got faster and faster and it took over, until we thought we were all dying. And we were.
 
Hats became the new art form. Everybody expressed themselves with their elaborate wide brimmed headgear. But the sun was stronger than our flimsy attempts to keep it off our faces. And then the wind started. Ferocious screeching winds which carried children down a street. Fashion had to reinvent itself very quickly, out of the hard necessity of survival. Grasping around in different continents and cultures, many fashion houses seized on the ancient styles of garments. Beduoin wrappings, huge tent like caftans, and scarves that covered our ears...
 
We were inheriting a scorched, balding, windy planet, one that a few generations ago might have still been savable. We did not have time to be angry with our grandparents. Besides, we knew our histories. We knew that the process had started much earlier, with the building of the big factories, the age when the warnings of poets began to be ignored. No, earlier still, when humans began to believe they were different from beasts, and separate from one another. By the time it was too late we understood that we were all part of the diamond mesh whole. Of Indras’s perfect web. And we knew humans, too by then. We had learned compassion. We knew their fallibility. Their peculiar stubbornness which came from egoist living. Their feeling that they, somehow, were not part of it all. That it wouldn’t happen to them. It saddened us, of course it did. But we didn’t really have time to be sad.
 
We had the story of the Titanic. We knew that the captains could never believe in the sinking. We had to take action ourselves.
 
We miss earth now, of course we do. Some of us are old enough to remember when she was still green and blue. Those calm and embracing middle spectrum colours and the peculiar way they had of stilling the heart. Before the mad redness came, and after the redness the huge dazzle. the white light that was rainbow splinter light.
 
I am particularly lucky. I managed to bring a large part of my family. Others were torn up, screaming at separation and loss, but what were we to do? There was only room for a few. Our new hosts were adamant about that.
 
They have cared well for their home. They know how many will be too many.
 
I am learning the new languages. The new beasts. I am learning them well. The strangeness of it all still makes me cry at night, but they are not so strange as our film makers would have had us believe. Above all they are wise. Wise and kind. It is strange of course that their lives are so short. They mature so rapidly. And pass on before you really understand them. Someone explained to me that this is because we are still carrying with us our sense of earth time, which is different from their time, and if we could only switch to their time we would experience the fullness of their lives. I do not understand this, or how to achieve it. So for now I watch them grow and die, every year another life reaching completion. Many things are the same here, and many things are different, but that is the hardest for me.
 
Still, as my sister reminds me daily, at least it is cool here.

Tamara Guhrs is a writer from South Africa.