Cleaning Up Your Room

   Walter's gaze settled on the playing children as he rocked in his porch chair, sipping lemonade. They know nothing of Before, he mused, and wondered if that was a good thing.

   Some of the children were splashing in the clear, drink-all-you-want water unaware that 50 years ago this same creek was sterile, brown and frothy, like a stopped up toilet bowl. Not only couldn't you drink the water, some claimed even touching it would be fatal.

   The children were playing some species-old game, running toward and then away from each other, laughing and rolling in the waist high green grass, a decade before, a hard, acid impregnated field of pebbles and small dead things.
 

  Walter looked up at the clear blue sky and took a deep breath of spring aroma’d air, both only recently rescued from the last remaining pieces of grit and pollution's stinging molecules.

   Yells of challenge and mock threats drew his attention back to the children now waging war from the middle branches of two opposing trees. How quickly those lithe brown bodies had scampered up to their arboreal kingdoms. Quite a contrast from the emaciated, lost-eyed youths of their parents’ generation.
 

  It was remembering these dramatic changes that drew his attention to the top of the hill and the Benefactors — what most people called them. Their eight-foot height was muted by distance, but four tentacles standing in stark silhouette against the sky bore witness to their alien origins.
Walter was here when they arrived.

   They came in huge spherical ships, landed and immediately went about their work. Some sort of shield that burned the hell out of anyone or anything that tried to penetrate it protected a mile radius around each spacecraft. Attempts at communication were ignored. Yet, periodically, plans and prototypes of new economic and ecologically clean technologies appeared outside the shield and were happily accepted by the puzzled populace. After a time, the Earth's older, more damaging technologies, simply ceased to function. Those who hadn't replaced the old with the new were then forced to.

   Sensing the alien’s overwhelming power, and with no indication of ill will, politicians began to adapt. They passed laws that supported the environment and more marvels appeared at the edge. They passed laws about Responsible Ecological Behavior, initiated awareness programs in the schools, and more wonders appeared—technologies to help in the clean-up, to help humans better understand both their planet and their bodies and what is needed to grow and maintain each.

   Once the Earth and the people were again healthy and vibrant came what became known only as The Call. No one was quite sure how it happened, how they knew, but over two years every person between the ages of 20 and 40 voluntarily entered newly arrived spaceships and departed Earth.

   Walter was in his fifties, so he stayed and watched as each year a new crop of twenty year olds left on the spaceships. Everyone understood they were on a mission of great importance to the Universe and would return after a time. If asked, people would say the aliens explained all this but no one could remember communicating with them. The only people who pondered this at all were the few very old people, like Walter, who remembered The Before.

     It had been 30 years since the first departure and, to Walter's knowledge, no one had ever returned.

   Thinking about all this — the Before, the Benefactors, the Call — always tired Walter. As his eyes slowly closed, his head dropped toward his left shoulder. Catching a last glimpse of the children, a sardonic smile visited his face and a tear trickled its way down his cheek. He was remembering what his mother used to say to him.

     If you don't clean up your room, I'll do it for you and send you the bill.
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