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Perpetual Snow Days, or While We Were Doomscolling
by Angela Yuriko Smith

When Hell freezes over, as my grandad used to say, and as a kid in the sweltering, bone melting hotpot of inferno left to us by my grandad, and those of his generation, I frequently wished it would. I’d never seen snow, I couldn’t imagine anything but the baking pavement that left tar burns on the soles of our feet when we dared to run across the road. The corporations turned us to corpses, sold us out, led us to believe the next gadget would save us, not from anything that mattered, like war, warming and wrath, but from boredom. We sold ourselves out for entertainment, clicked the checkbox, said yes to the cookies and gave full permissions to turn our world into an Easy Bake Oven, and when they suggested the next greatest thing to solve all our problems you’d think we’d have learned but shooting silver dust into clouds seemed so exciting at the time…

…and then Hell did freeze over. The silver linings tarnished to dust, blocking the sun, thankfully, the heat dropped and we cheered the plunging mercury as it kept plunging. When the first snow fell it was a miracle, chilly manna from on high and we made snow cones, not minding how the silver dust turned our tongues gray, then our skin. We only cared that the sky was gray, global warming was trending down, and our thoughts turned back to letting someone else run the show until everything went off air and we looked up and out the windows to see we were on permanent holiday, every day a snow day, and like a string of old Christmas lights we started going dark, one by one by one.

Leave it to humans.
We always fix what we break.
Humans, leave it be.

Fiction © Copyright Angela Yuriko Smith
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

More from Angela Yuriko Smith:

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Ryukyuan-American, award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years in newspapers. Publisher of Space and Time magazine (est. 1966), two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and HWA Mentor of the Year, she shares Authortunities, a free weekly calendar of author opportunities at authortunities.substack.com.