Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story,

exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

As we come to the end of living with the unknown, we begin again at the beginning. For the final story

of our third volume, we journey into the fictional, post-apocalyptic landscape of acclaimed

Nigerian poet and novelist Ben O'Krie. In this short story, superbly narrated by British actor Colin Salmon,

a man and a woman inhabit a world abandoned by humans,

grappling with what is at stake in beginning a new civilization. It was a long night after the end.

It was a long night after the end.

Many of us lived in the night and did not emerge. We knew nothing of what had happened,

except that one day everything went down, everything shut down. The electricity was out,

and the internet no longer worked, and none of the communication lines that ran the world existed anymore. We learned to live in the dark, in

houses under the ground, and in caves on the edges of the city, no one came out into the air.

We were a community that lived beneath the ground. We have forgotten what sunlight was, and the air we

breath came through the tunnels in the earth, filtered by the earth itself. For many years we

lived like this, pale and quiet, like human moles, unaware of what had been happening in the world above.

Over that time, many of our families died. People can't endure being away from the sunlight for long.

Many perished of sun deprivation. Many simply wilted and surrendered themselves to the earth.

Some of us tried to die, but couldn't.

I tried.

Several times.

...