The Sprout

By Brad Hunt

     "It's beautiful," the withered man gasped through his cracked bloody lips.  "Absolutely breathtaking. Look at this." 

     A snowy white desert reached for miles in each direction, varying only slightly atop the bloody remains of an empire.  No sound, not even wind, dared break the reverence of the scene. Dry flakes of powder still aimlessly wandered through the air, wondering wistfully what now to do.

     But the silence soon died behind fits of thunderous laughter.  "YESTERDAY! HA! It seems like millennia, but just yesterday I lay here in the shadows of a billion year's work.  Towering examples of man's glory.  Rushing sounds of flowing people.  Every time you turned, there it was.  The power of man!  Close your eyes and the imprints still remain.  Cover your ears and the sounds can still be heard.  Sleep, and your dreams are a collage of victories, dancing through your mind to serve as comfort through the night.  Even now, look!  See the power of man!"  He feebly grabbed a heap of ashes from the ground, and pressed them to his lips. "Taste what he has done -- what he worked so hard to accomplish!  Look at it! It's magnificent!" 

     But there was nothing.

     His soaring speech echoed and bounced off of nothingness.  Not a single structure stood.  Not a single person remained, save the man himself.  Nothing was there.  Life was present in only two forms, the man -- from whom it was quickly fleeing -- and a single, lone, speck of a sprout, grasping tightly to a now rare earth.  A green enduring blemish, upon the glorious face of perfection.  Though the man offered to share this monumental end with the prideful, mocking beginning, as the seconds passed he grew to passionately, and quite blatantly, hate the infant bud.

     "Look around.  This is what we had always meant to do.  This is what we needed to do, and we have -- with impeccable precision.  From fire to firestorm.  From rock to rocket.  Out of something -- more than our share of something -- we leave nothing.  A trillion year evolution that ended with a bang!  Man was always fascinated by what he couldn't do.  Every test that was presented, he lived up to.  But one thing always remained; one thing continuously loomed as a tacit scornful challenge.  One thing lingered and mocked man's power as an ever-present test: life."

     The sprout sat attentively, hoping to be forgotten. 

"We've, of course, tried and failed before.  Man raped nature, but it persevered.   Man destroyed millions of his brothers, but left barley a scar.  Some slaughtered themselves, just to aid the cause.  But they too left no more than a scratch on the face of billions.  But now, now we've done it.  Life has run its course.  Existence has met its match and now, now you sit here and mock the greatest feat -- the last feat -- ever to be accomplished.  Pitiful of you to think I'd die without first finishing the job.  You'd like to think that I'd let you stay and make us start all over again.  It's pitiful--"

     But his anger only aggravated the inevitable, and his coughing projected through the snow of sand and ash.  With the last of his life nearly gone, he finished a billion year task.

"Evolution," he breathed,  "ends here."

     The plant bent back in fright as a rising wind shook its virgin leaflets.  The man stared at the sprout with malice and hate.  With his last reserve of energy, he heaved himself over to his stomach, rolling with a cloud of ash.  The dust blinded his view and poured into his mouth, choking the life from his cold worn body.  But when the dust had settled, and death retreated for a moment, he saw the sprout slowly appear in front of him, covered in the off-white remains of earth. 

     "Trying to hide, are you?"  With great effort, he extended his arm to the plant, reaching it only with his fingertips.  The man caressed the leaves carefully, brushing the dust off of its stark green hue. 

     "There you are."  Blood dripped from his smiling lips. "You can't fool mankind."  He made a divot in the sand at the base of the stem, all that his fleeting energy allowed for him to do.

     "My brothers are gone, sisters are dead.  Queens and kings and presidents - dead.  Nations built upon fear and power, the mightiest of warriors and strongest of men.  Athletes and soldiers and mothers and children all dead and gone and fire - and ash."  A single tear disappeared to his cheek, burned away through the air by the heat of the sun.

     "I am mankind, may our race rest in peace!"  With these words his hand dove deep into the earth, and tore the roots of the plant away from their life giving home.  He screamed, a loud, wild scream, his eyes pulsed and bulged with rage.  His hand reemerged with the entire plant fasted tightly to its palm, and he threw the sprout far from him, as hard as life and death would allow.  But with this throw his scream fell short, abrupt; final and sharp.  The man slumped down to the ashes with a faint wheezing cough.  Then just a sigh.  Then a breath.  Then nothing. 

And the sprout withered in the ruins of an empire, fell victim to the sun's cruel ray.  The green turned to brown, and soon black as night.  And the sprout gave in and died.