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pielcanelaMy hometown is dying.
The M____ river that cuts through M___ town has been polluted for decades. And no one else is to blame but the Carrion family.
The Carrion family is a dynasty that has been in power in M___ town since Spanish times, when Ricardo Carrion curried favor with the imperial government by offering up a portion of his wealth to their coffers. Since then the Carrions have bullied, intimidated, bribed and stolen to stay in power, though their aspirations never got much farther than local level. They have tried to rise to higher government positions, but fortunately, their resources could only secure them a seat within M___ town.
As stewards of M___ town, the Carrion family allowed foreign corporations to set up shop, when they could get no permits from any of the neighboring towns. So M___ town flourished with an abundance of tanneries, rubber and plastics factories, recycling plants, and landfills.
All well and good, if only the waste had been better managed. But said companies clearly saw no need to adhere to any sort of health and safety codes, and M___ town, an idyllic greenland far from the metropolis, became world-famous for its toxic waste dumps. Its once-beautiful, crystalline river became the toilet of the world, as factories from all over came to systematically destroy all life in it.
And now that the M____ river is dying, M____ is also dying.
As far as she could recall, Josie had ended with this sentence. She had drifted off. Then again she had not expected to write much.
The other drugs made her brain hyperactive. It was hard to think ceaselessly and stay on the verge of falling unconscious at the same time. A few hours ago she found herself plagued with thoughts demanding to be written - thoughts about her family, her school friends, the pain the drugs brought, the highlights of her long and colorful career - and she couldn't remember what made her decide in the end to write about how the Carrion family had begun killing off the M___ river.
God knew she had written plenty about that subject. And yet, she felt she had not written about it enough. She had tirelessly attacked the clan for 3 years, since her retirement from her reporting job due to illness, and yet the issue of the M___ river had not gained traction, had not garnered enough outrage.
Not even the people of M___ cared. Why would they? The poisons seeping into the soil, into the water they drank and bathed with, made them all lethargic and incapable of complex thought. They were wandering about confused. Too busy burying their children, their friends, their elders, their mothers.
Josie had heard the doctors tell her family she would probably not last the night. But she heard this through a morphine haze, and she wasn't sure if she had been dreaming.
That was it, perhaps - she might have thought, a few hours ago, that if she was going to lose her battle to cancer that night, she was still going down fighting.
Josie's laptop had somehow not slid off her bloated stomach. It was on standby. Josie turned it back on to read what she had written so far.
My hometown is dying.
The M____ river that cuts through M___ town has been polluted for decades. And no one else is to blame but the Carrion family.
The Carrion fagoiif lfkp'opsdk aasfg;lkjbkjig sa'sfk daa
There were a couple more paragraphs of gibberish. Josie snorted. She had actually typed this. Worse still, she had saved it. There was a sober enough file name: "my last piece.rtf".
After all, how eloquent could you be on a morphine drip.
Was this it, she asked herself. Her family had allowed her to keep her laptop in spite of the doctors' objections, but they hadn't actually expected her to do anything with it.
Was it just another dying wish?
She called for her daughter to take the laptop away. No one answered. "Moning?" she called again.
If Monique wasn't there, someone else should have answered. Maybe her husband, or her teenage nephew, or even Luisa, her loyal housemate. She should have heard someone stir on the pallet at the foot of her hospital bed, far from the wires and tubes that kept her barely alive. Someone from her family should always be watching over her.
But there was not a sound.
Josie thought vaguely that she should be worried about this. That she should be afraid. That she should panic, reach for the button by her hand and call for the nurse, ask where her family was.
But she heard the door open, and decided she shouldn't bother. Someone had come for her.
"The keyboard isn't working right," she told this someone. There was no answer.
Instead, Josie felt the IV tube move, as the dextrose bag was being moved. She felt herself being unplugged from a number of tubes and wires, though not all. Her morphine drip was still attached.
She felt true alarm and started to struggle.
"Josie, it's me. It's okay," said a familiar voice. She couldn't place the name - it had been such a long time since she last heard it. "Just relax. We're taking you someplace safe."
The reassuring way this voice spoke calmed her. It wasn't as if she could struggle very effectively, anyway. Someone must have increased the morphine flow.
She lay still as two pairs of strong, gentle hands lifted her from her hospital bed and carefully transferred her to a gurney. There was no hurry, and she felt everything was all right; she was going somewhere safe.
~ part 2 is here
The M____ river that cuts through M___ town has been polluted for decades. And no one else is to blame but the Carrion family.
The Carrion family is a dynasty that has been in power in M___ town since Spanish times, when Ricardo Carrion curried favor with the imperial government by offering up a portion of his wealth to their coffers. Since then the Carrions have bullied, intimidated, bribed and stolen to stay in power, though their aspirations never got much farther than local level. They have tried to rise to higher government positions, but fortunately, their resources could only secure them a seat within M___ town.
As stewards of M___ town, the Carrion family allowed foreign corporations to set up shop, when they could get no permits from any of the neighboring towns. So M___ town flourished with an abundance of tanneries, rubber and plastics factories, recycling plants, and landfills.
All well and good, if only the waste had been better managed. But said companies clearly saw no need to adhere to any sort of health and safety codes, and M___ town, an idyllic greenland far from the metropolis, became world-famous for its toxic waste dumps. Its once-beautiful, crystalline river became the toilet of the world, as factories from all over came to systematically destroy all life in it.
And now that the M____ river is dying, M____ is also dying.
As far as she could recall, Josie had ended with this sentence. She had drifted off. Then again she had not expected to write much.
The other drugs made her brain hyperactive. It was hard to think ceaselessly and stay on the verge of falling unconscious at the same time. A few hours ago she found herself plagued with thoughts demanding to be written - thoughts about her family, her school friends, the pain the drugs brought, the highlights of her long and colorful career - and she couldn't remember what made her decide in the end to write about how the Carrion family had begun killing off the M___ river.
God knew she had written plenty about that subject. And yet, she felt she had not written about it enough. She had tirelessly attacked the clan for 3 years, since her retirement from her reporting job due to illness, and yet the issue of the M___ river had not gained traction, had not garnered enough outrage.
Not even the people of M___ cared. Why would they? The poisons seeping into the soil, into the water they drank and bathed with, made them all lethargic and incapable of complex thought. They were wandering about confused. Too busy burying their children, their friends, their elders, their mothers.
Josie had heard the doctors tell her family she would probably not last the night. But she heard this through a morphine haze, and she wasn't sure if she had been dreaming.
That was it, perhaps - she might have thought, a few hours ago, that if she was going to lose her battle to cancer that night, she was still going down fighting.
Josie's laptop had somehow not slid off her bloated stomach. It was on standby. Josie turned it back on to read what she had written so far.
My hometown is dying.
The M____ river that cuts through M___ town has been polluted for decades. And no one else is to blame but the Carrion family.
The Carrion fagoiif lfkp'opsdk aasfg;lkjbkjig sa'sfk daa
There were a couple more paragraphs of gibberish. Josie snorted. She had actually typed this. Worse still, she had saved it. There was a sober enough file name: "my last piece.rtf".
After all, how eloquent could you be on a morphine drip.
Was this it, she asked herself. Her family had allowed her to keep her laptop in spite of the doctors' objections, but they hadn't actually expected her to do anything with it.
Was it just another dying wish?
She called for her daughter to take the laptop away. No one answered. "Moning?" she called again.
If Monique wasn't there, someone else should have answered. Maybe her husband, or her teenage nephew, or even Luisa, her loyal housemate. She should have heard someone stir on the pallet at the foot of her hospital bed, far from the wires and tubes that kept her barely alive. Someone from her family should always be watching over her.
But there was not a sound.
Josie thought vaguely that she should be worried about this. That she should be afraid. That she should panic, reach for the button by her hand and call for the nurse, ask where her family was.
But she heard the door open, and decided she shouldn't bother. Someone had come for her.
"The keyboard isn't working right," she told this someone. There was no answer.
Instead, Josie felt the IV tube move, as the dextrose bag was being moved. She felt herself being unplugged from a number of tubes and wires, though not all. Her morphine drip was still attached.
She felt true alarm and started to struggle.
"Josie, it's me. It's okay," said a familiar voice. She couldn't place the name - it had been such a long time since she last heard it. "Just relax. We're taking you someplace safe."
The reassuring way this voice spoke calmed her. It wasn't as if she could struggle very effectively, anyway. Someone must have increased the morphine flow.
She lay still as two pairs of strong, gentle hands lifted her from her hospital bed and carefully transferred her to a gurney. There was no hurry, and she felt everything was all right; she was going somewhere safe.
~ part 2 is here