How the world will look after Trump's inauguration

In the shattered ruins of one of our once-great cities, a small boy in dirty rags points a long-dead iPhone 7s at a skinny rat sitting on a pile of rubble. The boy has no real concept of what the device is for; he was born long after it was last used. But his father has told him of a game he himself used to play as a carefree young man, capturing non-existent cartoon beasts using one of the slim pads. Pokémon Go, he said it was called.

“Daddy, I caught a Raticate,” says the boy when he finds his father, hunched over a small fire in the ruins of a Pret a Manger, stripped bare of anything edible years before. “I’m going to evolve it.”

The father, his beard crawling with lice, still wearing the vestiges of the suit he had put on to go to his job as an accountant the morning the world ended, looks mournfully at a couple of small hunks of meat on sticks in the flames. Barely a mouthful each.

“Did you catch it for real? I don’t think this sparrow is going to go very far.”

The boy sits next to his father and places the dead phone on the tiled floor. He found it in a purse around the neck of a picked-clean skeleton in what used to be the underwear section of what his father tells him was Marks and Spencer. He can’t imagine the time when the city was full of people, food and clothing available to everyone.

“Daddy,” he says. “How did the world end up like this?”

The father reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tattered piece of paper, unfolds it, and smooths it on the ground.

“This is a print-out of a story that appeared on the website of the Independent on the day that Donald Trump became President of the United States,” he says, though he knows none of the words mean anything to the boy. “We’re actually in the story.” He pauses. “Which is a bit weird. I’m not sure how that works.”

“Does that mean we’re not real, Daddy? Is the sparrow ready?”

“Not yet. And I think it means this is a work of journalistic metafiction. Best not to worry too deeply about it.

“Anyway, basically, it was written so that future generations would know exactly how the world went to hell in a handcart, charted via the Twitter posts of that Donald Trump I mentioned earlier. He created a very divisive world, because when the man at the top has views about women and people from other countries or different cultures, that makes other people think it’s OK for them to think that way too.”

Then the father looks at the sky. It’s been so long since he’s seen the sun. “People did a lot of damage to the planet in the old days. But Trump didn’t believe we had caused climate change, so nobody did anything about it when they could still have pulled us back.”

“What were the Chinese, Daddy?”

“China was a big country full of lots of people. A superpower, just like the United States. Trump didn’t have a lot of time for them. In fact, he went out of his way to upset them. Which was a mistake, because they had lots of bombs like America did.”

“Bombs, Daddy? What sort of bombs?”

The boy looks into the heart of the small fire. Bombs. Enough to destroy the world several times over. He says, “But why did Trump do all this?”

The boy picks up his dead phone and pretends he can see the Raticate he caught. “Do you think we can evolve like the Pokémon did, Daddy?”

“I think it’s too late for us now,” says the father. He inspects the sparrow; it is ready to eat. Then he pointedly looks out of the story at you, the reader, and adds, “Maybe back then, on the day President Trump took office.... That was our chance to turn things around.”

The boy chews the stringy meat of the cooked sparrow, and nods. “What’s Twitter, again?”

The father’s stomach rumbles. “Never mind that now. Why don’t you see if you can go catch that rat before it goes dark?”