Antarctica

The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived. I watched Aunt Maura float toward us in her hoverchair. “It’s cold!” she cried. Her chair produced a robotic hand that draped a shawl over her shoulders. She lived on other side of the world - the Arctic. Ninety degrees celsius was cold for her.

My mother embraced Auntie first. She was Auntie’s niece. (Well, Auntie’s great great great great great great great niece, but mum said it was rude to discuss a woman’s age honestly.) Auntie was a bag of leathery skin wrapped around a mess of toothpicks she called bones. She looked not a day over three hundred.

“Snow,” she called my name. I ran to her and awkwardly wrapped my arms around her and her chair. “Rainforest.” At the mention of her name my little sister joined the hug.

“Welcome to Antarctica,” I let go of her and smiled.

“Goodness, let me get a better look at you.” One by one Auntie popped her eyes out of their sockets. She felt around for her chair’s mechanical hand which took the eyes and gave her two new eyes. “What would I do without my chair?” She pressed those eyes into her sockets and blinked until they settled. “Those were my reading eyes.”

Mum drove the three of us back to our house, a mansion on a cliff overlooking the beach. Rainforest and I played with the sand and any shell fragments we found. Auntie talked to us between the paragraphs of her book.

Rainforest looked to Auntie. “I don’t understand why you still read. It’s much more efficient to simply download the memories of books.” She stacked six shells atop one another. Rainforest placed the seventh on and it all toppled over. She sighed and started again.

Auntie smiled at us. “I’ve always been old school when it comes to books. When I was your age they came out with ebooks.” She scoffed. “I wouldn’t have it.” Auntie licked her quivering finger and turned a page. I stared. I couldn’t tell if the pages or Auntie’s hands were going to crumble first.

Mum walked onto the beach carrying a tray of four glasses filled to the rim with boiling liquid nitrogen. “It’s so much nicer here than London.” She looked out to the thick grey ocean and hazy orange sky.

We had only been here for a month and I agreed in every way. I couldn’t stand living underwater.

“I always wanted to visit Antarctica as a girl.” Auntie’s shaking hand pressed a button on her chair’s armrest. The mechanical hand took the glass from mum and brought it to Auntie’s mouth. She sipped it. “I always thought that there’d be snow.”

“Yes?” I answered.

“No,” she sipped her drink again, “snow on the ground.”

“Why would I be on the ground?”

Aunt Maura looked at me in silence for a minute. “You don’t know what snow is,” she remarked at last.

“It was the name of my grandmother,” mum handed me and Rainforest our drinks. “She died in the second robot war.”

“It’s a name now.” Auntie paused. She struggled through an explanation. “Snow was soft pieces of ice that covered the ground. Antarctica used to be covered in it a mile deep. Snow formed mountains, cliffs, caverns, dunes, glaciers, islands, and much more. There were rainforests too.”

“We have rain,” I said.

Auntie closed her book and placed it on her armrest. “Now we have acid rain. We used to have water rain.”

Rainforest raised her eyebrows. “But how did the water get up?”

“It evaporated,” Auntie explained. “It just did. Back then nature was in harmony. In some places there was so much rain trees grew on every inch of the soil. Other plant life grew there as well, and there were animals. There were too many animals to name. Be proud, Rainforest. You’re named for the most vibrant and diverse life that has ever graced this planet.” Auntie eyes my mother. “Thank me. Your mother wanted to name you ‘Whale’ at first.”

Mum rolled her eyes.

“What’s a whale?” I asked. “What happened to it?

“Huge majestic beasts that swam through the oceans, filling it with songs their kind sang for hundreds of thousands of years. Beautiful, ancient songs. Humans hunted the whales to extinction. It’s better that way. Whales would have never survived in oceans like these.” She looked out to the black water.

“What happened to the ocean?” Rainforest asked.

“It used to be clear and blue. Humans liked to dump their waste in it. They liked to dump oil most of all.”

“Why, Auntie?” I sat at her knees. They lived in a beautiful world, so why would they poison it?

“People do the craziest things to kill themselves when it pays,” she opened her armrest and pulled out a paper box. She flipped it open and pulled out the roundest golden cigarette. Aunt Maura placed it between her thin and wrinkled lips, “or when it doesn’t.”