[Fiction] Close Your Eyes

By Erin Bondo

Imagine a hole. Make it bigger and bigger, like the lake sturgeon your Dad’s been crowing about since 1992, and deeper and deeper – deeper than that philosophy major who used to quote Descartes to you in bed – until it takes up half the planet. Keep digging.

Next, gather all the salt you can find: every saltshaker, every fizzy bath bomb you’ve been saving for a special occasion, the packets of salt from Fat Les’s Chip Stand that live in your glove box, last winter's road salt, your neighbor’s Himalayan salt lamp. Dump it all in the hole.

Now fill it with water. Turn on every garden hose, run the kitchen taps on full, melt the novelty ice cubes at the back of the freezer that you’ve never used, overflow your bathtub, do a rain dance, take an axe to the Hoover Dam.

Does it look familiar yet?

If not, add a generous sprinkle of microplastics, a drizzle of oil. And trash – heaps and heaps of trash, floating islands of it, undulating and mesmeric.

Still no?

Add more water, more salt, more trash, more plastic, more oil spills. Add dying coral reefs. Add melting ice caps. Add more and more and more until you have your very own ocean.

Open your eyes – and don’t forget to take good care of it.

Erin Bondo grew up in rural Ontario, Canada on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinabek and now lives in Scotland. She has been placed in the Bath Flash Fiction Award, longlisted for the Welkin Mini prize and has work forthcoming in the BFFA and Flash Fiction Festival anthologies. Find her on Bluesky @erinbondo.com