Air Pollution

THE PERFECT YEAR

It was 2029, a year in which everything seemed well, everyone was happy and not even concerned about anything at all. But that happiness didn’t last much.

In a town called Knoxville, there lived two childhood best

friends, Elizabeth and Marcus.  One day Elizabeth started to notice how everyone, all of a sudden, in her high school started to get sick really fast; it was something impressive, one after another were falling into a heavy flu.  

One day, after she came back home from school, she called Marcus to come to her home, so when Marcus arrived she started telling him about the flu problem in her school to see if in his school was happening the same thing and Marcus told her that the flu also seemed very strange to him, most of all that everyone was falling into it. They thought maybe after a couple of days everyone would be back to normal; however, they were so wrong.

A couple of weeks passed and everything went worse and

worse, now too many people were getting the heavy flu, also a lot of people caught what seemed like a virus; on top of all that, the air and the streets were gaining like kind of a greyish/blackish color. 

Marcus and Elizabeth started to dig a little deeper in what was happening, he was sure this wasn’t just another “virus”, there was something off about it; it wasn’t normal that at the same time the streets were getting that color. It looked like the virus was coming from the crazy amount of industries that were entering the town and because of the amount of air and soil pollution, people were getting severely affected by it. 

He ran to the living room to tell Elizabeth what he just found, after he told Elizabeth what was happening, Marcus had the amazing idea to go and see for himself what was happening. Elizabeth immediately warned Marcus about the danger this action may bring for him.

Three days later, Elizabeth was really concerned about the

flu, she was scared that she could get infected with it, and after all the things that Marcus told her, she was even more terrified; adding to that, she hadn’t seen Marcus in those days. Then she remembered what he told her about going to the industrial area, even by being aware of the danger, she decided to go and look for him.

She didn’t go straight to the place where the industries were, she just started looking around in the neighborhood, but after hours of searching, she started to get really worried and decided to go and search for him in the industries.

When she got there, the pollution was something shocking; the air was so contaminated that you couldn’t see properly, everything was blurry and black, the streets were completely destroyed and damaged to the point where the cars couldn’t even get pass it. 

“Marcus, Marcus!” – Elizabeth started yelling, desperate, trying to find him. After searching hours and hours, she finally gave up; also she started to run out of breath due to the heavy pollution.

Marcus was found dead four days later in the outsides of Knoxville, near the town Northville, where the virus hadn’t spread yet. Cause of death:  really heavy flu caused by pollution.

By Nashla Puerta, Step 9