writes.casa

Markéta thrust her hands into her pockets. She found some receipts, some old antacid tablets, cookie crumbs, house keys and a phone.

Well, it used to be a phone but its battery was long since dead. Remarkably, its blank screen was still un-cracked and so now, in the right light, it served her well as a kind of black mirror.

The keys were a sentimental memento of her house, now just one of forty thousand brick and concrete islands that she could see slipping beneath the waves of Portsea Island, from atop Portsdown Hill. Portsea was not really an island anymore.

The antacid tablets were crumbling too. In sympathy perhaps with the fish and molluscs giving way to all the ‘jellies’ which thrived in the acidified sea.

The receipts were hand written IOUs that tracked who owed what to who. Ironically, since the collapse of fiat commerce, markets were now much more free. It’s just that there was less to market than there had been in the fossil carbon pocket.