text: Every movie and television show, every novel, every video-game. They all seemed to portray the post-apocalyptic world the same way. A barren wasteland where nothing can grow. It’s not their fault, really. Humanity always assumed that the end would come in the form a mushroom cloud. Ironically, that was the case. It just didn’t happen the way we expected. Nuclear war wasn’t the cause of our demise, it wasn’t caused by our own hand, but by nature. A spore was released by an aggressively invasive crossbreed of mushroom that spread across the globe and wiped out each and every person alive. Everyone, that is, expect me. It would be funny if, you know, everyone hadn’t died. Parents always told their children to eat their vegetables, and it turned out to be great advice. Even as a young girl I was obsessed with mushrooms. I cannot remember a time when some form of mushroom was not a part of each and every meal I consumed. Portobello, Shitake, Porcini. Baked, boiled, fried. And yes, I’ve eaten those types of mushrooms too. I was in my late teens, and I couldn’t really call myself a fungi connoisseur if I didn’t experiment with every variety. I even ate some poisonous mushrooms. I did so with the utmost care, micro-dosing on the smallest of samples and gradually increasing the amount when my body had built a resistance. This is what saved me. When the mushroom spores were released and humanity was wiped out, my immune system saved me. So much so that, although the planet is now covered in these lethal fungi, I find it the staple of my diet. But it’s not just the mushrooms that have thrived, all of nature has. Vegetables and fruits only found in foreign lands now grow where council estates were once erected. Creatures of all shapes and colours roam the lands and oceans. The world is now covered in lush greenery and the water in the streams is clearer than it has ever been since man first created machines. Occasionally I’ll come across some relic from the past, the metal shell of a car or the crumbling remains of a building, yet in two decades most of what humanity had created was gone. Nature had pushed its way through the steel and concrete and now flourished once again. Sometimes, I wonder why I write this stuff down, it’s not as if anyone will ever get to read it. I managed to salvage some notepads and pencils in the early days of this great reset, and I try to write a little now and again. Maybe it’s for my own sanity, or maybe it’s just something to pass the time until I too join the rest of my kind. Or maybe it’s to remind myself of the great empire humanity had built, and just how quickly it all faded away. We thought of ourselves as the pinnacle of all existence. But to nature, we were merely a brief inconvenience.