In neomodern realism, Winter’s oil painting depicts a thermometer rising from the earth: 136 degrees Fahrenheit. Dried, dead branches hang like broken limbs from oak trees. A scrawny deer, skin taut over the outline of sharp bones, gnaws on brown grass. Rabbit bones, baked ash-white, scatter on the scorched ground.
In the trees’ shadows, people lie flat, conserving energy for their nightfall hunt.
Note: All paints in this piece have been ethically sourced from recycled materials, not from the earth’s two remaining industrial chemical processing plants.
Atlantic Ocean, Cristina Suarez, 2031
As you enter Suarez’s mixed media sculpture, plastic debris tendrils scratch your legs. At ankle height, a borax and lotion mixture replicates the texture of dead fish entangled in seaweed knots. Wet metal scraps from abandoned oil rigs clang like wind chimes playing a water-logged dirge. A lone surviving hermit crab skitters along the sandy floor toward a water filtration system where one quart of water is purified per hour.
Note: All toxins normally found in the ocean have been removed through a reverse-osmosis process for this exhibit.
Underground Shelter Performance Art: The Early Days, Odemi Maht, 2034
On hands and knees, gaunt children with dirt-smudged faces mime digging in barren soil. Adults mime shoveling, pausing for long, shallow breaths, fanning themselves. A willowy woman wearing a threadbare cotton dress points downward. People crawl like burrowing moles toward the cool, dank earth.
Beside them lie crude building materials: cinder block fragments and gravel soil.
Graffiti, Artist(s) and date(s) unknown.
Outside, graffiti masks the rotting concrete sidewalk. Colorful arrows point toward three remaining underground shelters. Open-mouthed stick figures form a queue for nutrient pellets. A chalk pipeline sketch ends with etched water droplets. Study the artists’ footsteps. But follow your own clues for survival.
Alexandra Otto writes stories and short screenplays. She just completed her first novel. When Alex isn't writing or teaching, she is outsmarting the largest bears in the world in Southcentral Alaska. @alexottowrites
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