Flames devour the clouds, while we stare in open horror. I do not know if there will be any more rainbows during my lifetime, because I do not know if there will be any more rain. I heard a rumor that some corporation signed a deal that was read to grant the cloud herders the right to do this, to vaporize our clouds and chase the vapors into their water collectors. I don't understand the rules that make it more advantageous for them to do this than to mine asteroid belts for frozen water, but something about the rules of ownership and claimed versus unclaimed space makes it easier for them to get their water from a planet instead of deep space that I guess is considered communal. "Mama, why are they eating the sky?" my three-year-old whimpered, burying her face in my leg. "I don't know, honey," I said. And although I didn't say it out loud--because you don't make promises like that to a small child, not when you don't know how long it will take or even if you will succeed--I promised to myself that I would find the answer to her question, and somewhere in there, the way to make it stop. I would see a rainbow again before I died.


Inspiration: "Drones in the Valley" - Cage the Elephant
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Eh.

The environment and sex was all tangled up in her mind, like strands of hair winding around her wrists or the plastic choking the life out of young trees whose trunks would never grow straight. Seeing an oil spill on the news was like a punch to the ovaries, and it robbed her of herself for days, leaving her walking hunched over to protect the wound. Victorious legislation or a successful Greenpeace blockade, and she basked in the afterglow for days. PETA was a bad boyfriend, and sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad and she kind of winced when she heard about them, but she had to know more.

Inspiration: "and say that a lot of my work deals with sex and
gender issues, but that environmentalism and peace activism get in there
a lot also." - quote from CoyoteCon
Story Potential: I am all conflicted. The story potential isn't that high, but the character writes herself. I just don't know where to put her.
Notes: So I went with high, so I'd find it later.

The algal bloom was a deep purple, and the town cheered. Their remediation had been successful; they could incorporate a town on the edge of the lake and fish in it and bathe in its water and drink from it (after proper filtration, of course). They had been a wandering town for so long, with three failed remediation attempts behind them, that this was cause for celebration. And the town was between a long stretch with no other places nearby, so their town would make a natural waystation.

Inspiration: A Science Friday podcast about a winning science project that used algae as biological indicators.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I love the idea of towns forming and then being a migrant town until they find a place they can remediate successfully enough to live there. Post-apocalypse-lite. Kinda a Western feel to it. Caravans of a town. Towns coming to other towns as they're on their search. Of course, this is only a setting, not a story.

It was the sound of crickets and frogs that startled her awake. She was in one of the most antiseptic sleeping rooms, and she knew that there were no nature tapes of the forest--they'd found those didn't help the subjects. There were wave sounds and whale song and white noise, but no tapes of the forest at night. This was not part of the experiment. She sat bolt upright in her bed, and saw that it was floating a foot above the ground in a scum of pond water. A frog surfaced and blew bubbles at her, then let a resonant belch loose. A cricket hopped up into the bed with her. She pinched herself, hard. She felt it sharp enough. She pulled out the journal she'd been reading and stared at the pages--and--

Inspiration: Marshlands - Dan Gibson
Story Potential: High, but mostly because it would be a nice escapist fantasy to write, not because it actually seems like a good short story, if you know what I mean.
Notes: She's not dreaming, and she's not gone through the looking glass into another world. More like Mother Nature went briefly into the looking glass to let us have some room, and now she's back and it's rain of frogs time. Actually, using that premise as the background for a magical realism story that's not about this might be a good story after all.

William the Silent frowned when the stadtholders came before him with their complaints, but he saw the way that it would go. Their dikes were failing, one and all, and there was only one option before them that they saw: to buttress themselves against the world. His military advisors, chomping at the bit to actually fight a war and justify their positions, saw another option: invade the neighbors and force them to make space. The water level was rising, and there was no denying that soon the stadts would be drowned by the waters unleashed on them by the first worlds in their great industrial race. The Netherlands had contributed their share to that, of course, but it was a small share, surely not enough to justify them--

Inspiration: A history entry about William the Silent and the Netherlands' revolution. Of course, this is *not* intended to take place in that time.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Option 3: Waterworld!