Deserted
    
Julia looked out across the barren desert. Homes had once stood here, people had once lived here. But not anymore. Thanks to global warming, Julia’s mother and father and her twin sister, Olivia, had been driven to Mars. Julia and Olivia had worked until the last minute, providing supplies and calculating figures for others leaving the Earth.

Julia had been in Peoria, helping a poor family collect enough food for the trip, when it had become urgent to leave the planet. The family had left. They offered Julia a space, but she couldn’t take it. She had to find her family. But by the time she got back to Chicago in her auto-piloted atmospherical vessel, her family had left, leaving only a small sheet of paper among the ruins explaining they had had to leave and signed with all of their names.
    
Now Julia glanced once again at the crinkled paper in her hand. “Love, Mom, Dad, and Livie,” it read. They were gone and they would not be coming back. Only some scientists stayed in the most remote parts of Antarctica, and even they, too, would soon be leaving.

Julia had no choice. She would have to stay here, in this land of endless wastelands, surrounded by flooding, marshy areas near the sea, as the ice sheets disappeared into the ocean.

She would need shelter, too. Most animals had already died out, unable to survive in the changing climate. But Julia had to protect herself from the sweltering heat.

So she set out to collect pieces of wood and brick from homes taken down too quickly to be used on Mars as their owners left, bitter reminders of the past and the people Julia had shared it with.

As she walked along the cracked asphalt road, her light, airy “moonwalk” slippers did nothing to protect her feet from the burning street. Some of the road had even melted.
But wait, what was this? A set of footprints. Julia wasn’t the only one left behind. . . .