It was hard to say when it started, because when the first person caught it on video it was subtle – and who knows when the first person just SAW it and had nobody believe them? First, second, seven millionth, it was what it was and it was undeniable: someone was taking a slow-pan of their garden when a middle-aged woman with a tired face walked up to it and put it in a box.
She put her hands under the ages and scooped it up – schoomp, like that, like a human scooping up a jellified cat by the armpits and butt – and slid it into a big cardboard box.
“Hey,” said the recorder. And that – even after a few days and a few billion gallons of digital ink – was all that there was to be said.
***
Then the same thing happened to a grove of trees by a convenience store in Georgia. The box was of normal size; a couple feet on a side. The pines were of normal height; a couple dozen meters. The two combined as smoothly and logically and cleanly as a cat scruffing her kittens, with only a few shed needles.
She reappeared ten minutes after that at a municipal park in Kyoto. It went into a box that looked like it had once held wine, from the plants to the stones to the pond.
And six seconds after that, the entirety of Algonquin Provincial Park was rolled up like a scroll and placed in a hollow tube that looked like it had once held wrapping paper. This was when someone managed to reach her and ask her a question, which was as follows:
“What the hell?”
The woman politely considered this, then reached out with a sigh, picked up the (slightly scuffed and alarmed) park ranger, folded them into a little piece of paper, then put them in her pocket.
Then she did the same with everyone else present, one at a time. She did not rush and did not lunge and it took about half a second, if half a second were ten minutes were half a second. Her movements were tired, but careful; firm, but kind. No blood was shed and no spines were snapped.
The little pieces of paper were tissue, and brightly coloured. The sort of thing you might pack a birthday surprise inside if you bought something at the last minute and left it in the bag. Every single folded scrap of paper went into the same pocket, which was on the front of her jacket, which was made of something that wasn’t leather, or was, or maybe, but was definitely old. It was not a very big pocket.
A few hours after that someone saw her piling the Great Barrier Reef into a Tupperware, rock by rock, coral by coral, fish by fish. Each delicate little half-bleached organism was placed in with her right hand, and with her left, a tiny splash of thousands of gallons of water to keep it moist. Sharks spilled in and out of her hands like minnows, and her brow furrowed just a little deeper with every deathly-white scrap of reef that left her hands.
***
After that she was everywhere, all at once, one after another.
In Central Kalimantan at midnight placing orangutans into a small cloth bag one after another, along with the trees they slept in.
In Manhattan during lunch, bottling the falcons, back slouched and legs dangling from the rims of skyscrapers.
In the Virunga Mountains that afternoon, scrubbing the forests for mountain gorillas with a loupe and a jewelry box and a long-suffering expression that no amount of squinting could hide.
In the Antarctic Peninsula amidst the endless winter twilight, piling glaciers and icebergs and penguins into an ice cube tray, and shaking an unfathomable amount of krill into a worn zip lock bag.
In Madagascar she spent over two minutes under the sunset with a pair of tweezers systemically plucking every lemur from the island into an old egg carton filled with cotton swabs.
And across the entirety of the globe, over the course of half an hour of deeply mixed feelings, she picked up every single mosquito using a petri dish and a drop of blood on a dusty shop knife. She made the cut without apparent flinching and wiped the blood off on her shirt when she was done.
New Zealand became fernless. The redwoods of California were plucked like carrots and put in potting trays. Every bed of moss was stripped and placed in a laundry basket. The mushrooms were taken out of the dark and fed into a bag of noxious smells. Every lichen was transferred to a pet rock named (by the stencil on his side) ‘Greg.’
If anyone got too close they were taken too, but too close was really very close, and she still kept vanishing so often that few had the opportunity. Much of the time when nobody had eyes on her it was assumed she was in the ocean. At least, that’s what everyone decided when a spy satellite caught her filling a portable fish tank with blue whales. The air filtration unit was wheezy and the glass was smeared and the moment she was done she sprinkled them with a little kelp from her zip lock, pulled out a second tank and her scoop, and left.
Two minutes after that was the last time anyone saw a grey whale. The tour boat was very surprised.
By the time forty-eight hours had passed, there wasn’t a single animal or plant or fungus or anything left that wasn’t a human. Astronauts looked down from space stations where someone had floated in and rudely taken their experimental crops and insects and saw no more green on the big blue marble under its white swirls. Even microorganism tests came back clean on every surface; some said they’d seen her wandering with a hand vac and changing the bag every so often, running it over anything and everything.
And still she hadn’t said a word.
***
On the third day, she started seriously working on the last remaining species.
The tissue paper came out again, and then back into her pocket, burgeoning with humanity. They were filed without sorting; packed without prejudice; tucked away for the sake of expedience and nothing more. The ones who fought and the ones who ran and the ones who asked ‘why’ and the ones who never knew anything was going on at all were placed side by side and one after another based on proximity, or something even more purely chance.
Violence did not work in any form. Someone got excited and launched a lot of it at one point; the offending missiles were removed from the sky like splinters and placed in a black heavy duty-garbage bag with red pull ties.
The very last human being on the planet to be collected was a sleeping premature baby in an incubator in a hospital in a country that – like every other one – no longer existed by any meaningful definition of the term.
She patted their head in a vague yet friendly way as she tucked them into the tissue paper. And then, seeing as her task was now complete, she gave them a triple-thick wrapping to use up the leftovers.
***
The geography and geology, she left with only a few souvenirs to remind herself of.
An old chip of rock from a river near a bay. A shell that had turned to stone. A bit of muck from a very, very deep place.
The soil she kept, and the water. They went into large clear plastic bags, for easy identification.
All of it went into her locker, but for the tissue-papered contents of her one large pocket. THAT went into a small, plain cardboard box, and that box was covered with bright wrapping paper.
Then she held it in one hand and a black marker in the other, propped it against her forearm, and wrote ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ on it in large, unseriously celebratory font.
***
She did not leave a forwarding address.