December 2040

Welcome to The Spot Writers. The prompt for this month is to write a story about the darkness at this time of year. This week’s contribution comes from the pen of Phil Yeats.

In April 2024, Phil published The Body on Karli’s Beach, the third book in his Barrettsport Mysteries, a series of soft-boiled mysteries set in a fictional South Shore, Nova Scotia town. For information about these books, The Road to Environmental Armageddon, his trilogy about the hazards of ignoring human-induced climate change, and his latest, a novella titled Starting Over Again: A Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy visit his website: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/.

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December 2040

Phil Yeats

 

Winter, the season of cold and darkness in our northern land,
When crazy people bundle up, looking like the Michelin Man.
To partake in outdoor activities under the sun’s enfeebled rays
while others recline by fires, waiting for the crocuses to bloom.

Once, the wealthy migrated like songbirds to the ‘Sunshine State’
searching for Sol’s warming rays.
But now, that’s not a wonderful choice.
Our great buddy to the south is a friend no longer.

Kevin laughed when he saw the verses on an obscure website in the winter of 2040/41. The United States and Canada were not on friendly terms, but cold, rainy darkness was good for business. Fresh snow was not.

Tonight was a perfect example. He had six Americans, members of two families, in tow. Each had a valid US passport and all their other paperwork in order, but the guards at the border, sealed shut for almost all individual travel, barred their entry. They’d approached Kevin through channels we won’t mention, and passed him a large amount of cash. Now, they were deep in British Columbia’s coastal rainforest, waiting in the dark for Kevin’s business partner, an American people smuggler, to arrive.

They would exchange clients. Kevin’s six Americans for a similar number of refugees escaping the United States. On this night, Kevin with his seven refugees would hike four kilometres to his vehicle, and drive to the refugee detention centre in Vancouver.

His passengers faced few obstacles because the Canadian government welcomed most people escaping the deteriorating freedoms in the US. And Kevin, if his name came up, was also safe because he’d received no money for transporting these individuals.

“No names,” Kevin said as his passengers clambered into his decrepit-looking people carrier. It was muddy, faded grey, with obscured numbers on its license plate. No one mentioned names, but he learned he had seven well-spoken passengers from two countries in his van. They were all fluent in English and overjoyed to be on Canadian soil.

He couldn’t say the same for the six Americans he left at the border. They faced a much longer and more arduous hike with patrols that could intercept them before they reached the anonymity of a larger urban area. They were not his problem. He had his payment, and if the American government wanted to refuse reentry to US citizens whose only crime was visiting another country, that was their business. Nothing he did would change any of that.

Three hours later, his tenth trip was in the bag. Kevin wondered what had gone wrong in the United States of America, the world’s richest country and the leader of the free world. In the days twenty years earlier, when he was a foreign university student in Boston, he observed fractured politics with ever-hardening lines been the Democratic and Republican parties, but the country’s carefully constructed democratic framework based on tripartite separation of the political powers seemed up to keeping the country together. Now, a three-term president was running roughshod over everyone, and the consequences looked bleak.

His phone bleeped. A text message from his partner in crime asking when he’d be ready for another exchange. He sighed as he headed home for a well-deserved rest. The Canadian economy was struggling, and the US reeling from its autocratic tendencies, but his people smuggling business was making him wealthy.

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The Spot Writers:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/

 

Kevin worked all day in the windowless stacks of the university library. In winter, he’d leave work at 5:30, walk home in the dark to an apartment where he always kept the window blinds closed. He had a form of autism, or something like it, that overwhelmed his brain with peripheral light, light coming at him from the sides, from above and less often from below.

He functioned well in the low-light conditions in the library stacks, using a small lamp with a very narrow cone of light that lit only the page he was reading. Kevin employed the same tactics in his apartment, closing all the blinds and lighting only the areas he needed to illuminate with narrow cones of light. He turned the lights off and on as he moved from one task to another.