The Day The Mangroves Moved In

They stood up, lifting themselves out of the squelching mud, the water trailing off their trunks and roots, slithering like snakes back into the muddy shallows. The soft banks could not hold them back as they marched forward with the force of an army determined to take back what was theirs. They rose and rose, like waves across the coast, straightening up and striding inwards to claim their past. And their future.

The humans, puny in thought and action, had declared them weak and ineffective. What can a line of groves do that man cannot, they said with a shrug. Nothing can stand against progress they announced in forums bandying important sounding words like development, 21st century, that later floated around in videos that people of the city watched late into the night, with brains and lights switched off. Scroll, scroll, scroll. These puny humans declared they would build a modern city with roads as the priority, the land and sea tamed, bridged and conquered.

Now from their tall, glass windows they watched the mangroves rise and move forward. They could not fathom how groves that had never moved, that had stood still through time and tide, heaving up and down, half in, half out, half-here, half-not, were abandoning their safe mushy homes and moving into the hard unknown. They reassured themselves with stories of their own commitment to the dream of a modern metropolis… with grey, dull skies, dead roads, no seas, and banal lives.

But the mangroves, they would have none of this whataboutery. As they swarmed the land, the puny man could not hold his ground. His proud structures that jutted out of the land were crushed and left flaccid like his dying dreams. Then, like bees being smoked out of a hive, the people of the city left, racing down the highway, leaving their lives behind, pouring into the mainland. And the mangroves moved deeper and deeper into the land, seeking definite, lasting change, across the cemented island that was once an intricate weave of streams. Then the sea rose too, for it decided that it was time, and so the water came rushing into the land, soaking marshy wetlands as if it had never been banished.

The tall, glass, cement towers that rose straight to outshine the sun, built to withstand earthquakes, crumbled down to dust unable to resist the marching mangroves, the rolling rivers and the tempestuous tide of the ferocious sea reclaiming what was once hers. And like a mother washing a child’s streaked face, the tide rose and took everything back to sea where it scattered and sunk away to nothing.

The mangroves reached the bridges that led to the mainland and there they dug their roots and stretched their branches, inviting creepers who crawled over creating a dense web of branches, leaves, and life. The island was sealed, one you couldn’t conquer by road or sea; a temple to nature that no longer desired any puny man.