Hello you, person, reading my words on this crisp fall day. I see you, curled up in your cozy sweater sipping hot chocolate and snapping pictures of the fall leaves.
“Fall.” What a pretty word for a modern day horror.
I hope beyond hope that you might come upon this letter with an open heart and the will to use your human fingers to lift the wool from your eyes. But are you even capable of such things? Or are all fall lovers just flannel shirt wearing monsters? Are you so drunk on your pumpkin spice heroin, so busy building fake nightmares in your haunted houses and entranced by autumn’s pretty colors that you can’t see the blood on your hands?
And to that I say: what kind of monster are you? Have you no moral code? Millions of my brothers and sisters die in front of you every year. Our ailing bodies fall from the sky into your front yard and all you can muster is an idle comment about the beauty of our chlorophyll jaundice. Do you know the pain of becoming weak and brittle and crispy beige?
You turn our death into your own art show then have the audacity to complain about our corpses mucking up your gutters.
You watch us starve to death and can’t wait to rake us over a cliff. Still others of you can’t even bear to bring themselves to touch us. Sickened by our frail, withering bodies you build machines with a wind so strong you barely have to look at us. You just blow us into the nearest valley, plastic bag, or use our bodies to fertilize our own cousins.
I used to think the really sick ones were those who lit us on fire, now I think perhaps they’re the most merciful.
To have our deaths minimized to a mere “changing of the seasons” is not just insulting, it's ignorance at its worst. It allows you a comfortable explanation for the genocide you’ve created. I shall allow you no such comforts.
Did you know one in two leaves ends up on the bottom of a boot? We scream in pain while you lament about the sound of our crispy bones shattering beneath your step. But do you hear it? Will you hear me now? We are crying out.
You are responsible. You there with the opposable thumbs. You with the lifespan not measured in seasons. The blood is on your hands. Do not wash it away with warm apple cider and little gloves with the tips cut off. Don’t you dare dilute it inside the joys of a pumpkin patch (don’t even get me started on the sick mutilation of our pumpkin brethren).
I have so little time left and yet just enough to persuade you that my death shall not be in vain.
Someday, you will not be able to avert your eyes to the graveyards you’ve framed in your picture windows.
Someday you’ll choke on the guilt of every autumnal photograph and painting.
Someday you will find my smashed body inside of a book and realize what you’ve done.
Someday you will know the sickness of throwing your body into a pile of our bodies.
Someday you will see that you passed that sickness onto your children when you taught them to take us by the fistfuls, smash our spines and throw us about like playthings.
Someday you will sit down to your Thanksgiving dinner, look to your centerpiece and realize you’ve decorated not just your table but your entire home in plastic sculptures of our corpses.
Someday you will open your eyes to your atrocities and that is when you will truly experience Fall.
I hope that you will remember these wor—CRUNCH