LEGACY (a short story)

This will be my final farewell. I know that I am dying. I've been trapped in this prison for almost eight hours and I can feel my insides cooking. The sun is intense and it's sucking up my energy like a sponge. I've tried to escape for so long now that my legs just don't have in them to keep trying.

And so these words will be my legacy to you, my captors. I will make a promise to you. My descendants will out live you all. They will see to it that when your time is up - they will be the victors.

My children will infest your life, and you will call them pests. They will do what has been programmed in their DNA. They will clean up your messes, will scavenge on your waste, and will do so in order to secure their survival.

We have been on this planet for over 300 million years. And we evolved into something that you fear. We are strong enough to out last you. We are better suited to this world and its terrain. And when you are dead and rotting, we will feed from you, and our sisters will lay eggs in you and you will sustain us for years to come as we feed from your rotting corpses.

As always, we will clean up after you. We will clean you up.

We do not need to farm, to build and to develop to survive. We are a plague, and we will devour your remains and your cities and continue on, long after you have gone.

Though I know that the end of my time is soon, I will die knowing that I have fathered hundreds of children. And they will carry my genes.

It was the coffee that attracted me to my prison. The smell of the damp rotting beans was too much to ignore. I climbed the wall and dropped into my hell, so full of heavenly waste. I have eaten my last meal, and now I will wait for the sun to finish my life for good. These glass walls are too slippy for me to climb, though I have tried.

And I am not alone. There are twelve of us in here, not quite enough for us to climb on each other so a few can survive. Which one of us will die first is the only question left. The sun acts like a laser, burning its light into our prison, scorching us one by one.

We have adapted to your selfish ways. There are other species that have suffered by your hands. Those species have been slaughtered, hunted and pushed away from their natural habitats. And you had no regard for them. But we have relished your endeavours. You feed us, though try to exterminate us. You shelter us though you hate our being near. You keep us warm though you would rather see us dead. You are a contradiction, and though many of us have died by your hand, we persevere. You will not make us extinct as you have others. We are too many and too strong.

And soon, you will destroy yourselves and we will laugh at your demise. We will multiply in your absence and recover the world that you have tried to destroy.We are made of stronger stuff. Step on us and our children may still survive. You study us, you have learnt to understand us, but we cannot help you with your self-destructive ways. You do not need any help with your self-destructive ways.

There is a female in our prison and she carries her young. She knows that her time is up too, and buries the eggs deep into the coffee. No doubt you will empty our remains into your sewers where you think the problem will be gone from you forever. But her eggs may still hatch, down there in the darkness and warmth. You will have flushed away what you think is your problem, but you will ensure that our descendants will be born.

We were created to withstand the destruction of humans. And we will go on. We are part of the food chain. We eat the decomposing bodies and vegetation, and are food for birds and lizards.We are too important to perish by your hands.
You, however, are not.