Extinction

After seven years, three months and ten days I finally found the last plastic bag.

Caught in a barbed wire fence in a Kentish field edge, it flapped itself to my attention. Locals had been mysterious, cagey even, about it. They sent me in wrong directions, told me it was all rumours, said, ‘why would the last plastic bag in the world be here?’

They had been protecting it, I swear. Shielding their secret from hunters like me. Many had come here before me, hearing the same stories; sightings of a plastic bag in the wild, glimpses of something white and rare while driving down the A2 to Dover. They had come but no one had found it. Until now. I have camped in the nearby Covette Woods for six days, systematically covering every acre of land in a two mile radius from my camp. I was about to give up, but then I saw it, flittering in the wind, a beautiful splish of white on a synthesized green canvas.

People always asked me what I would do if I ever found it. Would I take it home to the lab for analysis, risking government intervention and the weird form of fame that comes with plastic pursuing? Would I leave it in the wild knowing that I knew where it was, but no wishing to interfere with nature’s course? Would I trade it privately on eBay for millions of pounds?

Extinction

I didn’t know what the answer was until I found it, genuinely. I decided that the moment would instruct me.

As soon as I touched that strange material, I felt compelled to rip it apart. I hacked at it with my fingers in a frenzy, lusting for the experience. I threw the shreds in the air and they scattered across the grass, flipping and fidgeting their way away from me.

I kept only the handle part, and pressed it like a flower in this book you are now reading.