Chimney County has a good waste disposal system, but we must all do our part to keep the streets clean. Sunflakes melt tires into treacle, and if they’re allowed to bank up, they will catch the air on fire. Then sirens fill the air and we must all return to our homes and seal the entryways. Even the filtered air stinks of burning petrochemicals on those days.
I live in Smokestack 32A on Chimneysweep Street in Chimney County. I close the sunroof when Hyperion sails by overhead and his team’s hooves tear up the cobblestones of the sky to send the sunflakes raining down. Once Hyperion reaches the west, I don my asbestos suit and go out into the heat-hazed streets to shovel the driveway. I dump the sunflakes into insulated dustbins and not onto the street because I am a good citizen. At night, when the heat isn’t quite as fierce, I dream of snow.
No one has ever seen such a thing. It’s a fairytale creation, like unicorns or lions. In my dreams, there are no sunflakes, no asbestos suits, and no heat sirens. Instead of glowing with molten plastics, the world is white and flecked with synthetic diamond sparkles. I am not covered in soot and sweat. Instead, my skin shrinks against my flesh and my silver exhalations off-gas into the sky.
Is this what cold feels like? When I imagine hard enough, little bumps rise upon my skin and reach out to kiss the air, my teeth clack against one another like pistons, and my knees knock in the dance of freezing.
In my dreams, I slide out across a solid river, gliding with ease until I fall through a hole in the ice (that’s what it’s called: ice) and I am submerged in water hovering around 0 degrees Celsius. I wear my panic sluggishly. My heart slows. My movements slow, and I am breathing water. Not effectively. Not at all. And when I die, my spirit erupts somewhere far from Hyperion’s reach.
I never knew all the codfish went to the underworld when the Grand Banks collapsed. When my ancient ancestors first came from the eastern continents, the cod were so plentiful that you could hop your way across the ocean on their backs. This was back before there was plastic. My ancestors staked claims on land and sea alike. They killed the cod like they killed the great herds of bison and the sun-blocking flocks of passenger pigeons, only they used trawling nets instead of guns.
I wonder if I’ll see bison and pigeons down here, too.
I know one thing: one of these chthonic codfish has a map tattooed on its skin. I do not know how to find this singular fish in the sea of the underworld. In my death dream, my spirit corpse swims with the fishes, wriggling with the currents, and swirling through schools of aluminium-coloured fish. The shoal coalesces into the shape of a huge maw. It opens, big enough to swallow the world in a single gulp, and I wake from death to escape.
When I open my eyes, I’m in my air-filtered sleep tent clasping a tommy cod. Its mouth opens and closes with metronome regularity. Its gills flare and recede, flare and recede as it flops in my hands. It’s drowning in air. I carry it to the kitchenette and dispatch it with a knife. When I peel the skin away, I find my map tattooed on the underside.
This map is from a forgotten era. It’s like looking at a subway map from antiquity. I see landmasses where there should be none. Are those continents? “You are here” is marked in the middle of one of several oceans. It’s marked atop Chimney County, right in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Garbage Patch looks right, but the other geography makes no sense. The earth flooded those land masses away years ago when the glaciers melted and the polar ice caps disintegrated.
Nowadays, land is made from salvaged plastic, floating in interlocked masses atop a dead and stinking sea. There might not be land like in olden times, but there’s more than enough plastic to create a reasonable facsimile. As I trace my fingers along the contours of the map, I am transported to a place with neither sunflakes nor snowflakes. A vast field is polka-dotted with all the wrong colours. Instead of sepia, the sky is blue, and the earth is green instead of grey and black. And I see and smell blossoms of red, violet, yellow, and pink. Where are all the microplastics? Where is the smoke? My nose doesn’t know what to do with this lack of scent, so I sneeze. Then I hear a drone of sound as little yellow and black creatures land on the blossoms. Bees, I think. These must be bees. I thought they were mythological.
I lie down amongst living flowers and a vine creeps its way toward me, tendrilling down into my ears and whispering to me about the Queen of Snow. When flowers whisper, they sound like the cold things of my dreams. They sound like sleet in relentless wind. The frigid wash of white noise lulls me to sleep and I awaken on the green field now twinkling with hoarfrost, blossoms locked into place behind a thin filigree of ice.
A huge white caribou erupts from the frosty soil right in front of me. She gazes at me with red eyes and lowers her head, then bows down onto her front knees. Her name is Tuktu. I know this, though I don’t know why. I get on her back, and her muscles bunch then relax as she stands back up and then we are tearing across the sky like Hyperion, like Santa, like the archaeological ISS spacemark.
We gallop across the aurora, a green and red drift of light painting the evening in a coat so thick the stars and satellites don’t shine through. The northern lights shift, but Tuktu doesn’t lose her footing. She’s migrated across the sky all her life. We pass over taiga, muskeg, and tundra, rocks encrusted with lichen, massive floating icebergs, and sheets of ice reaching out across the Arctic Sea. We pass through a conspiracy of ravens, croaking and cawing as they wheel through the air. We travel for hours through sunless sky until we find a campsite with glowing ice mounds spread across the tundra.
Tuktu will not enter the camp, so I slide off her back. She snorts, then leaps back up into the sky and gallops off.
A massive igloo rises like a mountain before me. I pass sleeping dogs, their noses tucked beneath their tails, and crawl through the entrance. Inside is a lake, light flickering far beneath the frozen, translucent surface. That’s fire down there, the only familiar thing I’ve seen on this journey. I walk across the ice in my bare feet, reach inside my coat pocket and pull out a handful of sunflakes. I scatter them and they burrow like worms all the way through the ice, hissing as they go.
A woman clad in white fur rises from the water on the back of a whale, her hair a wild, black tangle of icicles. She has no fingers. Seals and walruses squeeze out from the stumps.
“You have no business here, qallunaat,” she says from the pinniped pile. She waves her sea-birthing hands, and like that, I’m back home.
I live in Smokestack 32A on Chimneysweep Street in Chimney County. In the daytime, I wear asbestos. When the heat is not so bad, I dream of winter and the caribou in the sky. I dream of huge schools of fish, and fire burning below the ice. I dream of these things, but I’m careful not to think of the woman with no fingers. I’m a good citizen. I go outside and shovel sunflakes into the bins.
This story previously appeared in Seminal Edits.
Edited by E. S. Foster.
Shantell Powell is a two-spirit swamp hag and elder goth raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. She’s a graduate of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University and her writing is in Augur Magazine, The Deadlands, SolarPunk Magazine, and more. http://shanmonster.dreamwidth.org