He saw it on the news when he wasn’t supposed to—a man’s voice, calm and serious, warning viewers of unprecedented summer heat, endless floods, and toxic air. The boy ran to his parents, who were arguing in the kitchen about bills. When he asked if the planet could die, they told him to stop being silly, to run outside and play.

But the fear felt real. He wrote his worries on a scrap of notebook paper and signed it: Please, someone listen. He rolled it tight, sealed it in a small glass bottle, and ran through the forest behind his house. The river waited below—young, bright, full of life.

The boy set the bottle on the river’s surface, and the river recognized its weight: a fragile wish to deliver. “I’ll take you,” the river promised, curling around the glass like a guardian. The boy watched it vanish beyond the bend and whispered after them both, “Find someone who can help.”

The river searched joyfully at first. It spun the bottle between reeds, bumping against litter and lily pads, overhearing laughter from picnics on the bank. Each sound felt like a possible answer. When a fisherman’s line brushed the bottle, it trembled, hopeful—but he pulled in a heavier catch and turned away. The river sighed and hurried on.

By autumn, rain came harder, and the river’s hope began to strain. “Hold tight,” it warned the bottle. The bottle plunged through the flood—past fields where crops lay drowned, past families clinging to rooftops and the scraps of what had been their lives. “Will they read me now?” the bottle asked. “Not yet,” said the river. “They’re too busy saving what they built.”

Years turned. Factories rose along the banks, coughing steam into a pink sky. The bottle slid through canals that smelled of iron. “They’ve forgotten you,” the river murmured, its voice muffled by waste. The bottle floated past drifting clothes, half-submerged toys, and portraits blurred by water—ghosts of lives that had stopped believing they could be saved. “Someone must still care,” the bottle whispered. “Maybe the children.” But the children only stared at screens that glowed like trapped suns.

A century later, the river stopped. What remained was a desert of cracked mud—but deep beneath it, a faint pulse still endured. A scavenger crossed the empty land, mask fogged from his breath. He saw the bottle half-buried, gleaming faintly, and picked it up. He shook it once, saw the pale ghost of paper inside, and muttered, “Nothing left.” The bottle tried to speak, but there was no wind to carry its plea.

The man walked on. The bottle rolled, settling into a crack in the mud. The river, sensing the bottle’s heartbreak, gathered its final strength and rose around the glass like a shield. In that last flicker of life, it kept its promise—guarding its friend from the silence that would swallow them both.

_

Light struck through the fogged glass, illuminating one surviving word: listen. The word shone for a moment—just long enough for the world to see what it had ignored.