I swear I have the most fucked-up dreams ever.

I was in the garden when I noticed the kangaroo-person. It was small, about the size of a German Shepard, and grey and twisted as though deformed, and instead of carrying its joey in a pouch it had it slung across its back. Its face was that of an old woman and as it hopped it grumbled nonsense poems to itself in a shrill and wavery soprano. I ran inside and told my parents, and that was how they knew.

This was not the first time strange creatures had shown up in our garden. There were small things, many-legged rodents and gigantic bugs, malformed and vicious, worming their way through the grass and the flowerbeds; the flowers had shriveled up long ago. Everything had started to die or change. It was poison, they said, poison in the water and the air. Our poison. It was all over the world now, and the rainforests were gone.

We couldn't stop it. The kangaroo-people kept coming, and soon we had to stay inside at all times. All the houses on the street were connected by tunnels and we visited each other, sharing food and clothing and complaints. The sky was a strange sort of yellow, and it never rained anymore.

One day strange people appeared on our lawns, suits on their bodies and shovels in their hands, and began to dig away at the earth. We crowded around the bay windows to watch, fascinated. Televisions didn't work anymore and radio stations had long since shut down, so there was nothing else to do. Luminescent dragonflies swarmed about their shovels, dripping toxins on their hands.

They dug and dug and somehow that was moving us forward. Our houses were inching along the face of the globe until suddenly we were at the sea. The waves were grey, and dead, and we were in a panic.

"They mean to take us all under the water," a girl who I had always hated told me. "We can live there forever, and breathe our own air, and not worry about the poison."

She was right, it turned out. But only half-right.

They didn't want all of us.

They crowded us into a great grim tunnel, its concrete sides opening up to the dirty ocean beyond. Every single person on the planet was there, milling around like frightened church mice. A man in a pea-green uniform stood with a megaphone on a podium, reading out long lists of names. "To the right," he said, and "to the left." The right line wound its clumsy way into a submarine, rusting and ancient and very, very small.

It wasn't a long line. The hatch closed soon enough, and the submarine bubbled its way beneath the surface. The last we saw of its passengers was their clueless noses pressed against the glass, staring out at us, leaving millions, billions of us standing there, marooned in our disbelief. The man still barked out names in his amplified monotone, calling out my name, the names of my sisters, my friends, all the people I had ever loved.

And, for a few of us, anger broke through the disbelief. What about us? was the question on all our lips. Were we to sit there, breathe this poison, drink this water, let the twisted people overrun us and keep us in our dank little houses? Were we to become what they were, or just sit in this tunnel forever, hoping that someday they'd come back?

We screamed and broke for it, rushing to the tunnel's edge where the grey water waited for us. We were embraced by the dead waves and dragged under, swallowed hungrily by our oil spills and chemical waste, while above us our neighbours waited for miracles. For God, or something like it.

And so we died.