Green Earth, Brown Mars (standard:other, 479 words)
Author: aiko-chan	Added: Jan 27 2001	Views/Reads: 3715/1	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A story set in the future about a girl reluctantly leaving the wasted Earth for a life on Mars.

Chelsea pressed her hands to the glass of the space shuttle window.
Below her, the Earth was getting smaller and smaller as she and her 
family left for the space station on Mars. 

She hadn't wanted to leave. It was true, the Earth was polluted beyond
help now. There wasn't enough land to grow crops, nor was there enough 
water to satisfy the population of over ten billion. There wasn't even 
enough land to live on anymore. Of course people had to leave. But 
Chelsea didn't want to. 

Chelsea had never seen a blue ocean --- all the oceans were brown now.
She had never seen a pale blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. The 
sky now was a murky shade of yellow-orange, and the clouds were a dirty 
brown from pollution. The only green grass Chelsea has seen was in 
books. Yet she didn't want to leave Earth. 

Earth was her home. Dirty and unusable as it was, it was too hard to let
go of. She knew that one day she'd have to leave. But she wanted to see 
a flower first, at least. There was a museum in Tokyo, Japan, that had 
a few flowers in it. Chelsea wanted to see the flowers so badly, but 
she never got the chance. 

Her great-grandmother has told her stories about summers on the beach in
Hawaii, back when the sand was white and the water clear and cool. She 
told Chelsea about climbing trees --- real trees! Not the synthetic 
ones that hummed as they produced oxygen, but real, living, green 
trees! She told her great-grandaughter about fields of flowers that 
stretched for miles, about blue skies, cool breezes, and drinking pure 
spring water, the kind you could buy in stores back then. Oh, what 
Chelsea wouldn't give to travel back to the time when her 
great-grandmother was a little girl. 

As the Earth grew miniscule in the distance, a tear rolled down
Chelsea's cheek. Her parents assured her that Mars would be like a 
"brand new Earth". Like it used to be. "But that's impossible!" Chelsea 
had protested. "You can't just pretend it's the same! It's not home." 

Now, as the shuttle touched down on the surface of Mars, Chelsea felt
her heart sink. She already missed her brown, smoggy home, where she 
had played in the closed-in sandbox when she was a toddler, and played 
snapball in the inflated domes. She missed walking by the murky river, 
tossing in blades of dry brown grass and trying to imagine the water 
being clear. That was all gone now, however. Now she could live on 
Mars, with clear water and a real, unpolluted sky. Yet she'd rather 
have the dirty Earth any day. For as far as Chelsea was concerned, 
letting go of her brown Earth for a green Mars was harder than living 
without pure water.


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