By Jessy Wallach, TIWP Student

There is a girl living at the bottom of the village well. There is a girl flickering in the fluorescent light of the metropolitan train station. There is a wrist bone buried in the dog house and a hair caught in the hairline fractures of every gum-spotted inner city sidewalk. There are heirs to broken bottles and billion-dollar businesses and failing taxi companies teetering on the edge of bankruptcy who were last spotted crushing ants in neglected public gardens. There are boys who worked nightshifts alongside their fathers and did not pause in the dusk/dawn journeys to and from smog-filled factories to consider the strangeness of the starless sky above them, nor how long it had been since they’d seen the sun. There are sons who did not come home. There are seeds struggling six feet under to break through stony concrete while women in white business suits give PowerPoint presentations on glass ceilings. There is salted earth and blazing forest fires, and a Paradise lost to smoke, and all that is found of that twelve-year-old friend to many is the plastic pendant in the pile of ashy soil beneath her bed. There is graffiti at the bus stop saying ABUSE OF NATURE and outraged announcers on oversaturated television screens pleading for the nation’s children to please come home. There is a war being fought in every oil rig and power plant and vegan health food shop that packages its products in plastic bottles with green labels sporting barely Indian designs. This is a war with no innocents and many hostages, tea leaves and thistle bushes spelling out OUR LIFE OR THEIRS in the guttered dregs on non-recyclable coffee cups. This is nature abusing back.