When West Became East

Microcosm | Flash Fiction | Character vs. Society

After the storms and the floods, the mudslides and fires, the members of The League hunkered down in Eastness because there was nowhere else to go.

Eastness used to be Westness, a land famous for its hot, humid, tropical climate — most hospitable to a dozen types of lizards. The biggest of those lizards, a razortooth skink, looked more like a crocodile.

The most obvious difference between it and a crocodile was its teeth. A crocodile can have 100 teeth, some four inches long. A razortooth skink can have no more than 22 teeth. They are barely an inch long, but as sharp as razors.

The favorite food of the razortooth skink are members of The League.

You would think this is a terrible thing, but it’s not. Eastness is tiny. It’s surrounded by a body of water more like sludge and with no fish. The land is loose sand. You can’t plant anything. The only drinkable water is in a small heavily guarded reservoir in the northern part of Eastness; the only food is chemically created and kept under lock and key at a commissary to the east.

If it weren’t for the razortooth skinks slinking through the tall sharp grass surrounding the food supply, the strongest members of The League would raid it daily, leaving everyone else to die.

There used to be millions of others who looked like members of The League. This was back when Westness and Eastness sat on opposite coasts with a huge mass of shopping malls in between.

Everyone said if you didn’t stop buying disposable clothing and electronics, that eventually, Good Samaran, would explode in a rage and destroy the lot of them. She nearly did.

Many of the survivors were surfers from a small cove on the outer banks of Westness. They were vegetarians who made their own clothes and grew their own food. They lived off the grid in a kind of hippy commune. People used to mock them, calling them Hippy Amish.

Aside from an uninhabited sand bar just to the west, their tiny cove was all that survived the storms and floods, the mudslides and fires. Given that technically their land now stood at the easternmost point of their old world, they changed the name to Eastness.

Eventually, the Hippy Amish renamed themselves too, settling on The League, thinking other survivors would take them more seriously.

So far, they haven’t heard from anyone.