short story by Claudia Alick. read 2 minutes.

In the before times, I would’ve been the one left behind. When buildings were evacuated, the signs always said to wait for help. Wait. That’s what the world told us: wait in your wheelchairs, wait in the stairwells, wait for someone able-bodied to decide your fate. And if they didn’t come, well, that’s just how it was. I guess that’s how it went down with the Great Evacuation too. They evacuated the healthy and the rich. The ones they deemed worth saving. And we—disabled, poor, marginalized—we were left behind.

They thought a meteor was going to hit the planet. They didn’t even try to hide their priorities. We weren’t on the list. At first, it was chaos. Mass death. Those of us left behind faced illness, starvation, the collapse of every system we relied on.

But here’s the thing: we’ve always been survivalists. Disabled people have always had to figure out how to get our needs met in a society not shaped to care for us. We knew how to make do with what we had, to adapt when things didn’t work for us. So, when everything fell apart, it was bad, but it wasn’t new. We’d been surviving without society’s help all along.

The communities that had already been doing without? We were the first to thrive. Practiced at mutual aid and subsistence living we found each other, gathered in small groups, and built what we needed. The Earth, slowly, began to heal. Climate disasters faded, and the diseases that had ravaged us started to disappear. The environment was no longer poisoning us. The society was no longer disabling us.  We rebuilt, not on their terms, but on ours.

The society we’ve made now centers accessibility. It centers racial and disability justice. We built a world where everyone is cared for, where no one is left behind. The food we need is plentiful. There’s no fear of mass shootings, no constant violence. For the first time, we live without the looming threat of destruction hanging over us.

I have a home that fits my needs now. I raise my family in peace, my kids playing outside living free. I never thought I could have all this in the before times. We’ve built this together, in solidarity. We’re the ones who actually care about life, and we’ve made it work. The Earth, finally, is thriving alongside us.

And I hope the ones who left never return.