This is a short story I submitted instead of a weekly discussion post in my Literature and Globalization: Oil Culture course this summer.
Angela woke up that morning feeling sticky. That wasn’t quite the right word. Slippery? Something wasn’t right. She opened her eyes and noticed a black liquid-like substance on her hands. As she got out of bed, her sheets felt… oily. It was almost as if they were what had emitted the black substance. When she shuffled down the hall to the bathroom, she noticed the wallpaper had black streaks running down the walls. The carpet also felt oily on her bare feet.
“This is weird,” she said with a sniff. “It doesn’t smell like much.” The shower water wasn’t clear, and her body wash didn’t make her clean. By the time she’d dressed, everything was oily and black. As she walked down the stairs, Angela couldn’t help but feel like the floor felt less stable, like it was losing it’s solid state. It must just be a side effect of whatever’s in the air, she told herself.
“Henry, are you hungry?” She asked, as she passed the door to the basement. Henry, her older brother had been staying in her basement for almost a month. He was a scientist; a brilliant mind; but he’d been recently fired and spent a few months in hospital after having a nervous breakdown claiming, ‘the Earth has lost too much blood. She wants it back’. Of course ramblings like that aren’t overly ‘scientific’ so the only way Henry could be released from hospital was if Angela agreed to take care of him.
There was no answer from the basement. Angela usually wouldn’t worry if Henry didn’t answer, but she wanted to ask him what the oily residue on the floors and walls were. He’d be able to identify the substance she figured, and put her mind at ease. Perhaps there’d been some kind of chemical spill and the airborne particles were coating everything. However, when Angela tried to depress the button on her toaster and her finger smushed into the plastic instead of pressing it, she started to panic. She pressed again, and it worked. Maybe the chemical fumes were making her hallucinate.
“What’s going on!? Henry! Can you come up here please!” she called from the kitchen towards the basement stairs. “Henry?”
There was no answer. She knew he wasn’t sleeping, Henry had trouble sleeping and usually only napped in the living room around lunch when Angela promised to wake him if anything seemed wrong. Well things sure seemed wrong now.
Anglea tried to wipe a clearing on the oil slicked kitchen window to look down the street outside, and her heart nearly stopped. Only the much-too-early-to-have-toasted-anything pop of the toaster startled her back to life. The trees tidily lined down the street in each house’s postage stamp of lawn looked like they were melting into black puddles. The cars in driveways as well. The roads were shiny and slick, the grass – which had recently been rolls of sod laid out after the housing development construction crews finally moved out – now had a black hue as well. This was more than just particles of something in the air from a chemical spill. As Angela reached up to clear the oil from the window once again, she noticed the sleeve of her shirt had nearly melted off, black oil dripping from her arm into the black sink.
“Henry!” The panic in her voice was now impossible to contain. Where was he? What was happening? She turned to run to the basement stairs, and froze in place. Henry was standing at the top of the stairs… kind of. The black tiled floor seemed to be sinking. Angela tried to speak clearly, but it came out as a whimper. “Henry, what’s happening?”
Her brother looked the most calm she’d seen him since he’d moved into her basement. There was almost a serene smile on his face. “We have stolen too much blood. Mother Earth is taking it back now.”
Angela trudged through inches of oil to get to Henry. She grabbed him by the shoulders, “Look at me! What does that mean?”
Henry’s smile faded. He looked at Angela and must have registered the panic coursing through her. “Fossil Fuels. Everything that exists because of the oil we’ve taken is being converted back to its unrefined state. I tried to warn you. No one would listen. The oil is going home.”
Anya Rousselle 