Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate

by Robert Sassor

  She lifted her face. It was wet, shiny, and swollen. She tilted it on one side, and it began to crumble into crying again. She said, "But, St. Louis? Ibrahim, it is more than a hundred miles. We will die."

  "It is a hundred and twenty miles, Awa. The council have worked it all out. There are still a couple of oxen, and we can take water in the cart. We have no choice, Awa. We must go."

  Ibrahim watched his wife sob, and Babacar slid from his chair and pushed out onto the veranda. In the mid-morning sun it was 50o C in the shade. Across the red dust of the dirt road he could see his 1eighbor Joseph's house, with its small plot of land. Against the brilliance of the sun he could make out the black stencil of the dead ox. Flies buzzed and settled on his hands, his legs, and his face. The tickling of their feet irritated him, but he could not bring himself to brush them away. He squatted down upon the wooden planking and slipped his hands over his head. To his left, a hundred yards distant, Mamadou's goats stood still and silent, their ribs showing, their flesh shrinking around their bones. The dry heat sapped everything but the flies. As he watched, one of the goats dropped to its knees and lay down to die. Inside he heard his father calling his name. It irritated him, like the flies, but he was paralysed inside and did not answer.

  * * *

  The boy watched his mother throw her gin and tonic at the wall. He watched a piece of ice spin slowly across the parquet floor, leaving a trail of water behind it. It came to rest against a Persian rug. The half-moon of lemon sat behind it in a puddle, and a big spatter stain of dark liquid rose like a ghost on the wall, invading the room with the violence of its presence. His heart was racing. He couldn't hear many words, just the shrill screaming and "You fucking loser! I'm leaving! I'm leaving!"

  He heard her heels down the hall, tapping quickly on the wooden floor. His father rose slowly and followed her. He then followed his father, watching his own small trainers as they trod in his parents' footsteps. At his parents' bedroom he held on to the doorframe. There was an open suitcase on the bed that bounced every time his mother slammed a piece of clothing in it. His father was saying, "Seriously? You're leaving? What about Jack? What about…?"

  Her eyes shone through easy, intoxicated tears, and she pointed an angry red fingernail at her husband. "Don't try. Don't you even try and take him from me. I'll fight. I'll fight you every inch of the way through the courts. Or any way you want, you son of a bitch! I swear it."

  The boy looked up at his father. There was no expression, except the certainty that he must have what he wanted. He said, "Do you understand how hard I can make it for you? Do you understand just how much I can make you suffer?"

  His mother threw a green blouse on the floor and dropped to her knees. She collapsed forward and buried her face in the quilt. She didn't cry; she convulsed. The boy and his father watched in silence and knew she would not leave, and they would go to Canada.

  * * *

  Akycha watched Petersen step towards him, his hands held out and an angry frown on his face. "Akycha! You must not be here now!" But as he said it, the man with the suit rose to his feet.

  "Dr. Petersen, we are done. I must return to Copenhagen."

  Petersen turned to the man in the suit. "We are not done. We are not done!"

  The man's eyebrows rose above the black frames of his glasses, and the lenses flashed blindly. "I am done, Dr. Petersen. I am done being insulted, and I am done being shouted at. I shall acquaint Professor Zandersen at Århus, and the government committee, with your concerns. That is the most I can do."

  Petersen's face twisted, and he reached unconsciously for the boy. He said, "The most you are willing to do."

  The man shrugged and moved past them. At the door he stopped and turned. Akycha could now see the ice cliffs reflected in his lenses. The man shook his head. "Positive feedback, the tipping point: scaremongering. We got there a century ago, Dr. Petersen. There has been no way back since the industrial revolution began. This is a living planet. Catastrophic change is part of how it works. It adapts." He paused and considered Dr. Petersen a moment. "You want my advice, Dr. Petersen?"

  Petersen shook his head. "No."

  "Stay out of politics. You don't understand power. Focus on your research. Do your job."

  They listened in silence to his feet clatter down the stairs. Then the front door closed, and after a moment a 4x4 roared into life. Petersen walked to the window and stared out.

  Akycha said, "What's happening, Dr. Petersen?"

  Petersen shook his head. He didn't look at Akycha when he said, "Not now, Akycha, go home. Go home."

  Akycha stepped out into the cold. A pool of dirty sludge lay melting where the Land Rover had been. Russet-pink light lay among angular shadows across the snow and the buildings. The sea on the strait looked inky black. A gull cried havoc and seemed to laugh. Then there was a noise. It was indescribable. As though the earth and the sky were tearing in half.

  * * *

  Akycha covered his ears, hunched into his shoulders, and screwed up his eyes. When he opened them again he saw people running. He saw them screaming but could hear only the ripping apart of the world. The ground shook under his feet, and he wondered if it was an earthquake. And as he thought this he saw the immense ice cliffs move. At first he did not believe what he saw. He stood frozen and stared. Then he went cold inside as the entire cliff began to crumble and slide. White dust billowed in giant clouds from the base. The noise rose to a screaming, screeching pitch. He was dimly aware of Dr. Petersen's door bursting open and Dr. Petersen running out towards him. Then the cracking and screeching turned to a deep roar, and the wall of ice, six thousand feet high, God only knew how deep, crumbled into the sea. Behind it the ice sheet began to disintegrate and, below, the sea exploded, swelled, fell in on itself, and rose three hundred feet above the small town, as slice after slice of the cliffs slid thundering into the black ocean. In his mind there was a moment of stillness and silence, and the last words Akycha ever heard were Petersen's: "There is no way out of the mine."

  * * *

  The boy stepped out onto the balcony, twenty stories above the traffic, and looked out across the gleaming towers of steel and glass, into the black sheet of the North Atlantic. He saw, but did not understand, the storm of photons bombarding the black sea with particles of fire. He remembered his father taking up his mother from her knees, lovelessly crushing her sobbing, limp body in his arms and telling him to leave the room. Far in the North he saw black clouds building and turning, like billowing black smoke. The sea looked motionless. The small swell that was racing towards him, towards the glistening towers of steel and glass, at six hundred miles per hour, was invisible; it would remain invisible until it reached the shallower waters near the coast, where it would slow to a quarter of its speed and rear up, two hundred feet into the air, to sweep away in a few minutes what man had built over half a millennium.

  The village elder called a halt. Some baobab trees near the side of the road offered some shade for the fifty people who had decided to go. St. Louis might offer them cooler temperatures, the sea, fish, perhaps work. They had covered thirty miles that day. Two had collapsed in the molten heat. Also an ox. The hot glare numbed your brain, boiled your blood.

  The oxen were given water. Eventually, those who made it to St. Louis would kill them and drink their blood. Babacar squatted in the shade of a tree. His father stretched out on the dry, red earth between the roots of a baobab and closed his eyes. His mother lay next to him. She had been silent for hours. Her eyes were open and very black. Her breathing was shallow but rapid. He saw the flies crawl on her face, but she didn't brush them off.

  He knew that he had been looking north. He didn't know for how long. He had noticed small black clouds on the horizon, far away. And circling in front of them, like stencils against the white and blue-black sky, the vultures rising high on the thermals of scorched air. The heat seemed to buzz and glare all about him, dulling the colours of the Earth and the bark of the trees, and
the hair on the goats, fusing them into the eternal yellow of molten sand. He didn't know when in the glare he had noticed that her chest had become motionless and still. He had noticed, but he didn't know when, how her eyes had ceased to see. Had become dry and dead like the sand.

  Everlast, M.E. Cooper

  "Once there was a desert—not made of grisly rock and arid sand—oh, no, my children, it was a desert of water. Multitudes of flora and wildlife flocked to its edges. Just up from the shorelines lived its people—just like you and me, only above ground! And happy, in love with a soft sun and soothing breeze and gentle night. They spent their days alongside the other beasts, weaving between the towering trees of the forests, learning the bird songs and how to paint in many different ways, with words and colors and songs, and how to sew the land with seeds. And the children's only duty was to dash carefree and safe through whispering grasses as tall as themselves until the sun lowered in the west and cast a pure, golden light over the earth—and everything was held in perfectness and peace, and for once, all on earth stopped and held its breath in awe and—"

  A long, absentminded pause ensued.

  "Uh-oh," Daphne sighed, brushing her thick, brown bangs to the side, giving her younger sister a knowing look. "Gran's got lost again."

  Harper snickered behind a hand and winked to the older, leaning over her crossed legs to reach out and gently shake the matriarch's blue-violet veined arm. One nudge and nothing.

  "Uh-oh, indeed," Harper murmured, watching her grandma's glassy eyes shimmer up at the dimly lit ceiling, her jaw left unhinged, her grip around her cane tightening, her bony hips thrust to the edge of her seat. "We may have actually stunned her this time." The sisters choked down childish glee, betraying their adolescence thoroughly.

  "Have you girls broken Gran again?" Mother heaved a sigh and a laundry basket into the sparsely decorated living room. "This is the third time this week!" She huffed, slamming the basket down in front of Harper, who sat rigidly on the dingy, plastered floor, avoiding her mother's heated eyes. Mother put her hands on her hips and frowned down at her daughters. "Doesn't she go through enough without you two constantly heckling her about the 'good old days'?" The pout was out, on both sides of the argument, and for a moment, all the Grey girls wore identical faces.

  "We are not heckling, Mother." Daphne stood indignantly, matching her parent in every mannerism. "We only want to know what it was like when people lived outside—outdoors, when the world was kind." Under her breath she added, "And not in this sorry excuse of a home we call Sewer City."

  "You hold your tongue, young lady!" Mother snapped a heel down, pointing a stern finger at her eldest child's face. "We are all indebted to the Grand Oligarchy. You know what would have happened to us if they hadn't built these safe havens. I will not tolerate ingratitude in this home!"

  "Some home this turned out to be." Daphne scowled, snatching up the laundry basket and twirling around dramatically. "Four lousy walls, one bathroom, and one bedroom to each household—oh, you're too kind!" She batted her eyes at her sister, inviting her to either join in or encourage her with some laughter. Harper covered her mouth and did the latter. Daphne soaked it up and spun back around, gracefully gesturing to the ceiling and declaring next, "We'll open the impenetrable glass roofing for three whole hours, once a day, just for you to admire how white and terrifying the desert-land sky is! Don't touch!" Daphne jumped, feigning terror at her sister. "That's nature! Have you learned nothing from your years of diligent history absorption?! Never trust nature—it will swallow you alive!" And, for effect, Daphne dove at Harper with a playful roar and capsized the laundry on her head. The two sang with giddiness, but, oh, Mother was not pleased.

  "Daphne Sunder Grey!" Practically trampling over Harper, Mother wrestled the basket from her older daughter and growled, "Would you for once act your age and show a little decency and respect for the blessings you do have? Now your sister's got to pick up all these clothes again and you'll be late for your Run!"

  "Oh, pssha." Daphne rolled her eyes at the subject, turning away to gather her hike pack of survival supplies, heaving it over her shoulder, and then heading for the open archway to the inner-city streets she still so endearingly called rat ruts. "They wouldn't dare leave without me. There's no other medic out there brave enough to volunteer their services to the Surface-land."

  "Crazy enough, more like it," her mother sassed, storming over to the kitchen corner, turning the faucet on for something to distract her swelling rage.

  "Oh, Ma," Daphne sighed, adjusting her industrial boots, standing in the doorway. "Don't you worry like that; it's perfectly safe out there. No one's gone missing in years. Not since—"

  "Since that little Bolt boy, yes, I know." Mother cut her off, anxiously twisting her hands through the only tattered towel the family owned. Harper quietly went crawling about, tossing stray attire into the basket. She pretended heart didn't just halt at the sound of that last name. The town may have forgotten, but she never had.

  "Ma, that was three years ago—he was fourteen, and he just got a little overeager and snuck out when no one was looking. I mean, for all we know he just disappeared, he could still very well be—"

  "Don't you say it!" Mother hissed, bitter tears in her eyes, her weathered hands coiled up in angry fists that only ever came out when one dared touch near the subject of how her own beloved husband died.

  Daphne knew she had stepped on a tender nerve, however unintentional. So averting her eyes, she found her sister on her hands and knees, stunned in fear. The air suddenly became almost too heavy for any of their lungs to process. And this time it wasn't even because they forgot to cycle new air in from the city vents.

  Without so much as an apology or a word of understanding, Daphne turned on her stubborn heels and made to go.

  "Wait!" Harper shouted, hopping to her feet, dusting off her dingy pants as she lunged towards the door. "Can I go with you? Just to see you off?" Their father left the same way, only she was never there to say goodbye at his departure. She'd never let another slip through her fingers again—save Jonas Bolt. And she'll never forgive herself for either's loss. Death is inherent, no matter what one did. She knew that. But the ones who passed never knew how much they bolstered her own worth in her meager life, and this lingering pain was something she could not seem to reconcile with. She would sooner die than let her sister now slip where the others have gone.

  Daphne started to smile, but Mother's voice came out instead—"Not today, Harper. They're about to open the dome, and someone needs to take Gran. You know how ravenous she gets when she goes one single day without seeing that wretched sky…"

  The sisters watched numbly, helplessly, as their mother went back to scouring gritty iron pots and pans.

  "Just—stay home this time." Daphne put a strong, calloused hand on Harper's shoulder and winked. Harper took in her tall, slender figure, for possibly the last time. She'd memorized the way her ponytail cascaded over her shoulder and how her blue, blue eyes were set off by an armada of blissful freckles. She'd traced countless times that scar down her right cheek, holding onto how it ended in this little niche that looked like a fox paw. But it was no critter that carved it into her soft flesh, rather a deranged partner gone mad from severe heatstroke out in the field. Harper would miss the elegant curves and premeditated ways her sister's hands stretched out so gently to even the harshest edges of the world. She clutched onto Daphne's wrist tightly, not daring to utter a sputtering murmur of such sentiment. She couldn't be weak, not in front of Daphne.

  "Bring me back something good," Harper chuckled quietly instead, giving her sister's arm a tender shake in salute.

  "Only the best for you, little sis." Daphne laughed mischievously, roughly tousling her sister's auburn, braided hair.

  "Hey!" Harper made a swat at Daphne's escaping figure. "Get lost, you idiot!" Her laughter carried her sister to the end of the pathway. Daphne turned, winked once more with the complete, wild freedom of a true
adventurer, and, with one last thumbs-up, she vanished into the dank Sewer City streets.

  Harper's face fell instantly. A sudden, frigid dread blanketed her. She encased herself in her own arms' warmth to ward off the chill. "She'll be back," she whispered, though she couldn't shake the agonizing sense that Daphne's absence was settling in permanently. So she told herself once more, "She'll come back to me."

  "Harper June, will you please make yourself useful today? I'm very busy with the neighborhood's association meeting for this afternoon—we're discussing the city's name change—so long overdue. Sewer City? These old, humorous games our ancestors used to play—let's just say some dead things are better left so. How it's survived this long, I'll never—" Mother's voice faded off down to the bathroom door where she continued narrating her pet peeves to anything that cared to listen. Harper was not among them as she stared coldly after her sister. Did her mother not just see Daphne leave? Didn't she know the stakes—of course she did. Why did she always act like she didn't care—Harper's stomach churned at the thought. She cast her dull blue eyes down at Gran, who was still fixed intently on some far thought beyond the confines of the stuffy ceiling's encasing.

  "Gran." Harper gingerly touched her fingertips to her grandmother's malleable skin.

  Gran jumped, clutching onto her granddaughter so suddenly it startled Harper. "Hush, child!" Gran went on in her usual storytelling voice. Her dry lips cracked into a delicate smirk that betrayed her old age. "I haven't finished the story. The ending's the best part...!"

  Harper, laughing lightly in a flustered way, nodded, gripping Gran's hand back in anticipation for the story's resolution.