It happened to our saurian cousins.
It will happen to us, too.
Crushed and pressurized, our bones trapped between billions of layers of sedimentary rock. Extracted and refined, our blood poured into barrels of premium petrol.
What types of vehicles will our bodies fuel?
Who will sit behind their wheels?
Parker Davis is a writer, a reader, and a complicit consumer of Earth’s dwindling energy supply.
An oil executive lectured at a geology seminar and gifted each student a novelty cup. His speech proclaimed that hydrocarbons were a more valuable resource than water, and that those who object could find a free drinking fountain right outside. Before he finished, the entire audience had turned to plastic.
Dan lives with his wife in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. He finds fulfillment in writing stories both short and long.
Fila stood by the Packard as a hot wind blew gritty dirt devils around her. She stared at 26 acres of Blackland prairie, a gambler’s final gamble. A gusher, he vowed, Texas gold. Fila saw only dirt, a dry hole gone bust, but it was risky to tell him no.
Susan Hunt lives in Texas, a place that informs her writing as well as her history. Now a retired technical writer and editor, Susan writes flash fiction about Fila, whose history is entangled with her own.
He called me at work. “The house is flooding!” he said, then laughed.
I rushed home, panicking. He was wading knee-deep through black sludge in the living room. “It’s crude oil!” he said. “It’s coming in through the bathtub! We’re rich!”
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have lit that celebratory cigarette.
This story was based on the prompt “it’s crude” at TypeTrigger.