The Next Ice Age

When they tell you, you’re a snowflake, special and unique, you nod your enormous head and attempt to smile, except that what you’ve been practicing in the mirror never quite achieves the happyhappyfaceface your mother is always asking for. Eveline can deliver it right on cue, ringlets bouncing, tulle petticoat a perfect disc as she twirls.

When you twirl, they tell you: watch out for your tail! Good Lord, Terraline, how can you forget that thing is back there?

When it is dark and Eveline is brushing her perfect chiclet teeth, you whisper to your mother, I wish I was Eveline.

Your mother rolls her eyes and huffs, says, heaven forbid, one of her is more than enough, which makes your heart swell. You do you, your mother says, pulling the covers under your chin. Let Eveline do Eveline.

Eveline twirls and you sit. Eveline is a snowflake who dances. You are one which has landed and stays put. And everyone is happyhappyfaceface.

When friends come over, Eveline says they’re really her friends and they only let you play so you don’t eat them. She leans over the side of her bed and shows pictures from books that make you cry when you lie on the bottom bunk in the warm, moist air of your bedroom, saying, look, your ancestors! Your father put up wall decals when you were five – jungle leaves, palm trunks, cartoony forest animals. So you’d feel at home, Eveline teased from above. At the time, your favorite book was Giraffes Can’t Dance and you would make your parents wait eons as you gazed at each page. And then, for your birthday, those decals and later your sister, whispering until you cried and your parents came into the room wiping sleep from their eyes, saying, enough already, enough!

So you learned to cry without making a sound, your sobs rocking your sister to sleep.

In middle school, she invites everyone over for a sleepover, giggling as she puts in the disc for Jurassic Park, and your friends’ faces swivel between the movie and you in equal measure, and you sigh and pick at the pills on the unicorn jammies your mom keeps insisting are too small.

The problem is your arms. They’re never going to get longer than this, or lay flat at your sides, or do much else than wobble there in front of you. And the size that fits you up top is completely different than the bottom.

They say, you’re pear-shaped and that’s a perfectly normal shape for a growing teenage body. Aunt Cindy is pear-shaped and good Lord, she can’t beat the men off with a stick!

Your mom suggests more salad, and nothing you say convinces her your digestive system isn’t capable of handling salad. Stop being such a picky eater! But when you give in and push forkful after forkful into your mouth, Eveline comes out of the bathroom flapping a hand in front of her face, saying, gawd! What crawled up your ass and died?

Sometimes you want seconds for dinner, and your mother plucks another chicken leg from the red-striped tub and tosses it toward your face. They study their mashed potatoes, take long swigs of Sprite – anything other than watch the thrusts of your neck as you swallow that chicken leg whole and ask for another.

When Eveline can’t find her cat, they look at you, then away.

Your sister invites you into the bathroom to smoke with her friends. High School has made her simultaneously nicer to you and meaner to everyone else. She says it’s because she’s matured enough to value your individuality, but you know she likes how people look away when she strolls down the halls with you a step behind.

They tell you, inhale slowly, just try it, but you shake your head, the ridges of your skull showering their shoulders with white foam from the ceiling panels. Your lips can’t close around something that infinitesimally small. In fact, they can’t close at all, just lay there, rigid against the slick line of white teeth the dentist is so proud of. Look at those chompers! he says every visit.

Squeezed next to the first stall, you listen to Rachel Rostetdler talk about her boyfriend and the things they do in the backseat of her car. She describes his moans when she digs her nails into his back, when she bites his shoulder. They look at your hands, your nails. Your teeth. You imagine Cooper Stratt lying on top of you, how it would feel to rake your nails down his back while he does something you don’t quite understand. But then another image takes over: the sudden spill of blood pouring from his back onto your belly, warm and welcome against your cold scaly skin. The taste of his shoulder, the snap of sinew and bone between your teeth.

Cooper asks Eveline to the Winter Formal. Your parents tell her she has to take you, too.

When you’re getting the dresses in their slick plastic bag from your mother’s hatchback, you see Eveline’s cat slipping in the flap three houses down, and something inside you swells again, warm and heady. It breaks open, takes flight, and you are extra nice to Eveline because of this small private thing you know and will never tell.

The night of the Winter Formal, it snows while you wait on the porch and you are so cold, so cold in the gold satin dress your mother said brought out your natural earth tones.

A snowflake lands on the back of your hand, near the corsage your father bought for you, saying, my princess, as he slipped it over your claws. The snowflake doesn’t melt because there is nothing warm to melt it, not your skin, nor your breath. And when the car pulls up and Eveline bounds down the steps, you rise slow as an ice age and follow.

***

Eden

Gretchen held her foraging basket, on her face an expression leaning toward hope. Keiran can’t stand that look. She’d worn it through her first pregnancy, then their second. Every time after, she simply looked terrified, like the rabbits in that room books call a kitchen. An entire room devoted to the cooking and preserving of food. It amazes him that people used to preserve food for weeks, months. If they are alive a month from now, he will be amazed.

But Gretchen. Gretchen and her hope. “All righty,” she says, swinging the basket.

He wants to tell her stop playing, conserve her energy. But there is something rising in him, watching her like he used to across a classroom where teachers droned about agriculture, animal husbandry, weather patterns. There is no agri to culture, no animals to husband. And one weather pattern out there: imminent death under skies bereft of atmosphere.

Gretchen is on her toes, face close. “Keiran? What is it, honey?”

He cups her jaw. “Nothing, darlin.’”

He checks her cuffs and hems, ensuring the tape is tight. He taps the gauge on her ventilator, tugs the rim of her goggles. She repeats the process with him. Air-tight. What with the condenser coils and fluid recycler, they could survive out there interminably. With enough rabbit jerky, which they stuff down into their pockets.

Gretchen curls a gloved index toward thumb. Ready.

They trudge across ground so dry, it has cracked into millions of spiderwebby lines. Near the compound gate lay the remains of gardens so old, no one alive has worked them or remembers how. Something white sticks up. Their ancestors buried people down there once, offering what little moisture they could to the few remaining plants.

They head toward the mountains, closer than they appear, washed-out tans along the horizon. Kain comes along with the solar rover and they climb in, wave at the three other couples from three other compounds. Kain drives jagged, aiming for desiccated bushes still clinging here and there, obliterating them in puffs of dust and stem shards. Keiran knows Gretchen is close to tears, weeping for what might have been rekindled. Kain slows, holds up two fingers, and Keiran and Gretchen leap. They’ve got three days.

*

They eat jerky when hungry, sleep when tired. They’ve walked forty miles to the west and must turn back soon.

Gretchen is pushing his chest, shaking him hard.

“I found something. No really, Keer, you’ve got to see this.” Her mouth is down by his ear. She whispers like anyone is possibly in a fifty-mile radius, but sound does carry; hopeful sounds carry furthest. Right through his soul.

He rises and follows, disbelieving until he steps through a tangle of parched underbrush. His foot sinks on the other side. Surrounding his shoe, a color he has never seen before. Grass, he remembers, from their lessons. This is called grass. The thicket stretches out on each side, curving further than he can see. Metal bars provide support for the writhing, weaving vines, brown on the outside, green in here, a perfect dome through which the searing sun shines, only briefly, just enough.

“My god, Gretchen.” He slides the trowel from his waist belt, old and rusty from disuse. Here it is. Proof. But Gretchen’s glove pushes it away.

He watches her remove her goggles, her hood, the rebreather. He scrambles to stop her but she backs away. Dropping each item until she has removed every stitch. By the time he’s lumbered to her, she stands at the edge of a pond. In only her skin, breathingbreathing, her body shining in the small circle of sun trekking overhead, with more water behind her than he has seen or imagined in his whole life.

She helps him de-suit. He touches the grass and a tear falls, salty and plump to the ground.

And then she pulls him down on the grass, the softest bed they have ever had, and she moves atop him while he gazes at all this green. She collapses onto his chest, and he can hear it in her breathing, her faith in it, in their bodies.

After, they inventory, still naked and glowing. She kneels next to the plants. She makes guesses at what she sees, and he writes them all down. She was always best in botany. They find orange discs peeking above the dirt, and Gretchen clasps a frilly green top, and what comes loose is as long as her forearm, nearly as large around. She wipes dirt on her thigh and places it to her mouth. They take turns nibbling, small slow bites.

Across the pond, something golden swaying. Wheat, he recognizes. Big ripe heads tipping in the breeze. He stands on tip-toe but cannot see to the end of it.

“We’re saved. We’ve saved them. Us.”

The look on her face.

“Keiran. Keiran, we can’t take any of this.”

The look on his.

“Gretchen. It’s the only thing we can do.”

They argue for hours. The sun lowers, shadows draw toward them, prickling their skin.

“They’ll eat for a month,” she says, sweeping her arm. “Then what?”

“Duty,” he replies. “Report everything to the elders.” The voice of his father’sfatherfatherfather.

“And when the other compounds pick up rumors?”

Inter-compound war is not so distant a memory. That white bone in the garden.

“We cultivate this,” she says. “Let them live and harvest their seeds. Grow their children. Maybe then we discover how to build this within our own walls.”

It is not just the seeds of these plants she is speaking of, her hands across her scarred belly.

They lay on the grass, shivering, but it is good to feel cold, to feel anything.

“What should we call it,” she asks into his neck.

There is a name in his memory, something buried too deep to grasp, but he will find it, dig for it and hand it to her, the name of this place.

“The garden of….”

***

Amy Foster Myer lives in Swarthmore, PA with her wife, two daughters, geriatric pets, and an abundance of musical instruments and yarn. She earned her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fiction Southeast, More Queer Stories Anthology and others. Her chapbook Where we are going to next was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. More about Amy can be found at amyfostermyer.com.