Welcome to The Spot Writers. The prompt for this cycle is “when the snow melts.” Phil Yeats wrote this week’s story.
In September, 2021, he published The Souring Seas, the first volume in a precautionary tale about the hazards of ignoring human-induced climate change. The second volume, Building Houses of Cards, appeared in May 2022. He’s now published They All Come Tumbling Down, the third volume in his The Road to Environmental Armageddon trilogy. For information about these books, or his older soft-boiled mysteries, visit his website: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/
***
First Encounter
by Phil Yeats
Amir Fadel was a four-year-old Syrian
from a Jordanian refuge camp. Two days earlier, he’d arrived in Halifax with
his mother. Her great aunt Hamila and uncle Abdul greeted them on a winter
afternoon at the Stanfield International Airport. There was no snow on the
ground—Halifax had recently
experienced one of its periodic snow-melting warm and rainy spells—but the wind was howling and the temperature
a frigid -10.
Amir skipped along the broad airport walkway
and stopped by a strange stairway, when his mother yelled. She held his hand as
he gingerly stepped onto the moving floor that immediately turned into moving
stairs. At the top, he broke free and ran onto the enclosed pedway across the
departure area’s access road. He stopped in the middle to stare down at the
roofs of the cars slowly moving past.
On the other side, his old aunt knelt beside
him and pulled two padded garments from her large carrier bag. The first was a
pair of padded black pants with white shapes, and the second, a padded green
jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. She pushed his legs into the pants, and his
arms into the jacket. She then replaced his ragged sandals with fur-lined boots
and pushed knitted mittens onto his hands.
When she pulled the hood over the head and
snugged it with a string tied under his chin, he felt trapped like a baby
wrapped in brightly coloured cloths. And he was far too hot.
“Don’t panic,” Aunt Hamila said. “In a few
seconds, we’re going outside, and it is much colder than you’ve ever felt.
You’ll like being snug as a bug in your new snowsuit.”
He watched as his mother wrapped an old coat he’d
never seen around herself, and Uncle Abdul opened the door. The gust of wind
that hit Amir’s face was unbelievably cold.
Early on his third morning in
Halifax, Amir rushed to the kitchen. He knew Aunt Hamila would be there
preparing some new treat for their morning meal. On the first morning, he’d had
bran flakes with raisins in milk, and after that a piece of toast with
raspberry jam. On day two, a whole boiled egg. He could only once remember
eating an egg, and he shared that one with his mother. Today, Aunt Hamila
promised another wonderful new breakfast treat. Nothing like the meager
helpings of tasteless porridge he’d eaten every day for as long as he could
remember.
He stopped when he reached the
kitchen. Outside, everything was white. White stuff covered the ground and the
deck, and all the tree branches were coated in white.
Aunt Hamila knelt beside him. “Today,
I’m making pancakes for breakfast, but I’m not making them until everyone is
up. If you put on your boots and snowsuit and mittens, you could go out and
play in the snow.”
She always talked to him in a
language he understood, but the last word, snow, was in the strange language
his mother and his aunt and uncle spoke to each other. He was learning a few
words. Snow, the white stuff in the yard, was the newest one.
He ran to get his boots, mittens, and
snowsuit. When Aunt Hamila had him suitably bundled up, he charged into the
snow on the back deck. Sometime later, when she called him in for breakfast, he
said, “I’m bringing some in to play with later.” He gathered up an armload of
sticky snow and dumped it on the kitchen floor.
After devouring a glass of milk and
two pancakes with sweet syrup on them, he returned to his pile of snow.
“It’s all turned into water,” he
wailed.
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