Page 2 - July 2017 Contest Winner

Earth Turns the Final Page

by Kevin Lankes

A collection of gas and dust, molten metal, and the promise of more; a picture of an
infant Earth sits comfortably in a frame on the edge of the Moon’s Tycho crater. “Ah, those
were the days,” says Earth, opening the photo album on a shelf beside the frame. She takes out
a picture of her first orbit around the sun following the formation of her soft, primordial skin.
Earth turns the photo and traces the words written on the back: “Baby’s first road trip.”

Earth remembers learning to breathe oxygen after flipping to the tab labeled “Puberty,”
when her fur sprouted in all shapes and forms. “Your chemical composition is going to go
through some changes,” Jupiter had told her. She thinks back to the shifting color of the
glowing aura around her, as the soupy green transformed into a rich lapis lazuli.

“Your body will change as well,” Earth recalls Jupiter mentioning as she holds a picture
of the drifting plates of her once-whole outer crust. She smiles as she remembers that this was
around the time Venus began to notice her.

“That tickled!” she giggles, holding a picture of her skin covered by thick green fur and
pummeled by the regular footfalls of sauropod dinosaurs, nibbling amongst the greenery. Earth
thinks of the tiny scampering things that once ran beneath the feet of the mighty thunder
lizards, and that soon inherited her luxurious resources. How they ran through her flowing hair
and sent shivers of joy down her spine. Intense nostalgia overtakes her as she remembers the
lush and unsullied days of her youth.

“Your growing ecosystems are the envy of the solar system,” Saturn once told her
through the gorgeous vistas of his mighty rings. Earth beamed with pride in the breadth and
complexity of the life she once played host to.

Now Earth groans as she flips by pictures of the first marks left by man. Her gaze shies
from the barren patches of upturned soil, her innards excised for purposes that would serve to
poison her. Tears fall for the smelted veins transformed by mechanical beasts and made to float
above her like dust mites in a dry spell.

Earth closes the book, and her once luminescent blue-sky clouds over with a dark
sulfuric rain. Her pores erupt with the molten blood of four billion star-crossed years.

“It is time to say goodbye,” says Jupiter.

The pure barren wastes of Mars call to her. “You will soon be like the rest of us,” he
says. “Really, it isn’t so bad.”