Life flounders below zero degrees

Life flounders below zero degrees

fiction
Edward w Pritchard

Life flounders below zero degrees and civilization is extinct.

Human kind shrinks and shutters below zero degrees as animals are slaughtered by man for warm blood and thick skins. People huddle underground likes rats waiting for the protective cloud cover to return to the sky that bring the communal urges fostering man's altruistic outpouring. Below zero degrees there is no cooperation. Entire forests are burned for one day's sustenance. A hundred buffalo are driven over a cliff for meat. Strangers are driven away.

Elderly persons expire when it's below zero and stiffen where they fell. Children cannot talk and parents lay still, rocking, without comment fearful of winds aloft. Relatives disappear and neighbors vanish when the temperature is below zero. Freezing winds screech from distant mountain peaks driving snowy darkness.

When it's below zero strong men venture forth into the elements to return with secret rocks heated to explosion to surround sickly coughing children. Bent women strain against driving snow to distribute dried berry and seeds from ancient hutches. Wood piles are pirated for warmth when it's below zero. The oldest most venerated Grandmother chants and sloshes boiling sacred waters in polished gourds stirring black waxy barks and dried red plants into swirling heated potions for use as medicines to return cheerful spirits.

Envy the tribe that sits in a twenty buffalo skin tee pee when it's twenty below zero. Envy the tribe that has meat and wood to share when it's twenty below zero. Sit, listen, hope and pray when it's below zero. Who will return the heated air to the earth?