Mend the Broken Glass

Mend the Broken Glass

**Fiction**

by Helene Weintraub

The glass cracked when the earth cracked, when the tarmac began to heat up, fast, and the plane’s wheels sank into it. Sarah Burgs, a journalist, watched as they attempted to remove the plane from the pits in which the heat had caused the airway to melt like candle wax. When she asked why her flight was delayed, she almost couldn’t believe it. “The tarmac melted?” She put on her glasses to take a closer look out the airport window and there was the plane with its wheels stuck inside the ground. She never saw anything like it, and everyone else appeared to be just as stimulated by the strangeness of the event; cameras glued to the windows, just like the rubber now attached to the ground, similar to a glob of gum under your shoes.

After three hours, the plane recovered from its unusual state and was ready to fly again. Everyone cheered but Sarah Burgs kept quiet. She held on to her passport and thought of turning around. She wondered how the earth could melt so quickly, how it could just crumble up like a slice of bread or a Popsicle in the summer sun. It never occurred to her, until now, that the earth could ever sink. But most of all, she wondered why no one else was worried.

Sarah Burgs is the kind of woman who always speaks her mind. She is good at it too, and it’s why she became a journalist, and already has a large audience who look forward to her articles weekly. She once preached about the dangers of global warming, but in truth, it was hard to deliver the unpopular opinion. People weren’t as interested in the earth’s rising temperatures and rather she wrote of the upcoming elections or the cute puppy who made his way back home after several years of disappearance. Sarah Burgs understood well that technology, to be clear, electricity, was one of the greatest enemies of climate change and still her concerns always hung loosely from the thread of her career which depended on the use of her laptop and the ability to receive information from across the globe, but also to keep her readers engaged happily. If anyone would describe Sarah Burgs, they’d say she is the best example of twenty first-century women, always with her newly dated phone in hand, laptop of the latest model in her carry-on. She travels consistently by airplane and never thinks twice about ordering anything online. She was always comfortable with her reputation as a journalist and even now, her first instinct was to write to her audience about the convenient flying contraption that had nearly sunk into the depths of the earth. But now she wondered, was her reputation responsible for the melting incident?

When Sarah arrived at her destination, she watched the news announce the unbelievable coincidence of the sinking plane, on land. She took notes on how the intense heat was able to melt the wheels into the tarmac. People all over social media posted images of the scene and Sarah was surprised that most people found it humorous, in the sense that it was a unique occurrence, incredible, and something to talk about. It certainly is something to talk about, but not in that sense, she wrote in her journal, to add to her own article. Sarah Burgs began to wonder what could possibly happen to the earth if the heat levels grew by extreme measures. She wrote down the word, dangerous, in her journal and believed it. Later, when putting together her article, she stared unconsciously at her glowing laptop with all its wonderful features, the lights, the wire leading all the way to the outlet in the nearby wall, charging the battery she overwhelmed throughout her day’s work. Just turning on the device was as simple as buttering a slice of toast if you had the ingredients. How could such an incredible invention be the subject of the neglected climate changes that could possibly destroy the world? Could it really destroy the world? Sarah Burgs could hardly write her article with all of these thoughts pounding her brain. She tried to write about the damage, or even other simplicities of the modern world that are causing the climate changes such as oil drilling and fertilizers. Perhaps the plane incident would wake people up? she hoped, but already she knew that surely it would not.

The main problem was that the glass vase had already broken into millions of pieces and even if Sarah Burgs could come up with a way to save the earth from global warming, damage is done, done for generations now, and it would be most difficult to mend. Still, Sarah Burgs didn’t give up and published her article, for what use are words if they cannot be told for the greater good? She took the broken glass and mended it by the smallest inch, bringing awareness to the colorful glass that was once beautiful, now suffering in its shattered state. The dry glass certainly cannot be mended entirely. Sarah Burgs did not believe for a minute that people would ever give up electricity, even if it meant saving the earth. She, herself could not depart from the benefits of the revolutionary universe. What she did come to believe, is that it could be mended lightly, not prevented, but dismissed for a while. It wasn’t the greatest solution, so she prayed someone would come up with a better one. She called out for assistance because in truth, the responsibly of global warming falls on every human being across the globe, not just herself and her small article. She wrote: We have failed our reputation as humans, to take care of the home we were given. The glass is broken, it will never be well-mended, neither will our reputation as humans. Still, it can be mended, we just need to figure out how.