Warming the World

      Winston hesitated. Suncast shadows sketched a new black and white landscape in the snow, different after each big wind. The shivering reflex began even before he stepped outside the cave entrance. He knew twenty-three words for cold and none of them were pleasant. But he continued, drawn by a small, dark silhouette. A present from the storm?

     Face opposite the wind, a dream of treasure propelling him forward, he swam — the only word he knew to describe the motion that kept him atop the white death. Maybe the dark shape was a frozen animal. He started to salivate, then swallowed quickly. He didn't need a mouthful of ice.
He felt the cold enter his body, getting stronger, moving deeper. Wet clinging, wind driving, night numbing, shivering, quivering, familiar cold. The only thing he had known since Mama died.
Book. The word came to him when he was ten meters away. Not an animal, or a magical machine, but books are also good, he thought as he retrieved the frozen object. Mama said so. Personally, Winston preferred squirrel.

     Huddled inside the cave, he tore out a page and paused. He was hungry and the book would warm him inside, but he remembered what Mama said, “Always read a book before you eat it”. So he did.

    Without her to help, Winston had to sound out the long words, and even then he couldn’t tease meaning out of every one. But reading reminded him of Mama so he continued.
Winston had eaten twenty pages before he realized the world in this book wasn’t always cold. After forty pages he knew that he was reading about "Science", after sixty that the book was mostly about two words he didn’t understand and couldn’t pronounce: "ecology" and "ecosystem." New words but they didn’t taste any different than "environment" or "element", which he did understand and had eaten yesterday.

    He ate the last part of the book quickly because he was very hungry and tired of reading. There were a lot of people in this book, all doing whatever they could to stop some threat to the planet. Winston knew he was a people, but Mama said he and she were the last ones. “Global warming,” what the book called the threat, wasn’t interesting and sounded stupid to Winston. Why would anyone want to stop warming? Mama used those very words on her last day, and "Ice Age", and a whole bunch more she told him never to repeat because they were bad.

     Winston knew what this book was. It was “fiction,” stories people made-up to tell other people — when there were other people. Fiction seemed silly to Winston, but it tasted better than Trigonometry, which was the last book he ate.
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