The Spot Writers – “Motivation” by Phil Yeats

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to write a story involving a penguin.

This week’s story was written by Phil Yeats. 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 final 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/

Motivation

by Phil Yeats

Completing the online version of the Dale Carnegie self improvement course was the last requirement. With that confidence building step in place, he could venture forth and save the world.

Just weeks later, he swam into the moon pool of the tourist ship. For hours, he entertained the punters alongside the other penguins, diving and leaping for the fish they threw at him.

At the end of their daily show, the lights dimmed and the other penguins swam from the pool. Our hero did not. He waited, perched on an inconspicuous ledge, waiting for the massive underwater doors to slide into place. The ship’s sojourn in Antarctic waters had ended for another season. Destination, New York City.

The trip, with a port call in Rio to drop off the tourists, seemed endless. Our hero, an emperor penguin, remained cooped up in the closed pool, bored out of his bird skull, but not hungry. His accomplice, the ship’s chief cook, kept him supplied with fish.

Finally, the ship slowed for the last time and the underwater doors slid open. The emperor dove in and headed toward shore. The water was horrid; far too hot, and it tasted awful. His instincts said return to the moon pool, but he had an important task, and time was tight.

As the water became increasingly brackish, he searched for the East River. Next stop, the United Nations headquarters on the river’s western bank. It soon came into view. He clambered ashore and walked with as much dignity as a penguin could muster to the massive building. He had an invitation to address the UN General Assembly, the first Antarctic native to receive that honour.

Global warming had reached a critical point for the world’s penguins. He, as the representative of the mighty Emperor Penguins, was there to convince the delegates the time for action was now. And with the confidence he’d developed during the Dale Carnegie course, he knew he’d do his fellow penguins proud.

***

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

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/

The Spot Writers – “The Year We Stopped G.W.” by Chiara De Giorgi

Welcome to The Spot Writers. Prompt for this month: anything to do with global warming.

This week’s contribution comes from Chiara De Giorgi. Chiara is an Italian author and currently lives in Berlin, Germany. She writes fiction, with a focus on children’s literature and science fiction.

“The Year We Stopped G.W.”

by Chiara De Giorgi

On my desk, in my room at the Boarding School at the End of Dreams, I keep a thin glass vase with a blue papier-mâché flower in it. It is a magical flower that moves and dances when there is music. My friend Periwinkle, a flower fairy, created it last year for the Mid-Spring Fest. Every time I see it, I am reminded of everything that happened last summer…

Yes, last summer… Although everything started at Mid-Spring.

The Fest is always a happy moment for us students: mid-terms are over, and it is finally possible to stay out a bit more. Chill on the grass, have study groups by the pond… also secret trysts at the edge of the forest, of course, but they’re secret so I’m clearly not supposed to talk about them.

The flower fairies are typically in charge of providing fresh flowers to decorate the hall, which is where the problems started.

“We couldn’t pick any flowers”, said Mirabelle. “There weren’t nearly enough!”

Her friend Gardenia confirmed her words. “Yes, the meadows are practically empty of flowers.”

To be honest, at the time we were all more preoccupied with finding a way to still have flowers for the fest than with investigating the reasons behind the lack of flowers in the fields surrounding the school (which was due to no bees being around, by the way). The flower fairies came up with the dancing papier-mâché flowers and we soon forgot about this incident.

As the season progressed, the days got longer and the sun got stronger. The Larks – that is, the early risers, be they fairies, gods, shapeshifters, humans or whatever – set up a running group, led by one of Hermes’ descendants, a stunning blonde appropriately named Hermione. Every morning, before class, they would run across the school grounds, and when they showed up at breakfast with their glowing faces and dishevelled hair, they were typically welcomed by the sleepy eyes and the grunting of the not-yet-caffeinated rest of us.

One of such mornings, they rushed in calling for Professor Fishtail with urgent voices.

Professor Fishtail comes from the Land of the gods and more precisely – you probably guessed it – from the Sea Lands. His field of expertise is not limited to sea creatures; however, breeding and raising small water life forms is his hobby and it so happens that the big pond in the middle of the school grounds hosts a population of various kinds of fish that he himself carefully picks and procures… Or I should say hosted, as all the commotion on that fateful morning was due to the fact that the Larks, passing by the pond, had noticed Professor Fishtail’s precious creatures floating on the water.

The poor guy was inconsolable.

“I can’t believe all of my beloved specimens are dead…” he kept muttering, slowly shaking his head (which caused his fish tail to sway). “How did I not notice that the water was getting so warm?”

At the time, he was too shocked and the rest of us were too speechless, so no one discussed this event in a constructive way. More important: no one had the intuition to connect it to the flowerless fields and no one thought of investigating this further. It was only after a series of gradually more serious incidents – that culminated in the nearby forest catching first pests and then fire so that all the animals came running and stomping inside the school grounds – that the school council officially met to examine all the unusual facts that had happened in the previous months inside and around our school.

Long story short: it turned out that the cause of everything was a single student.

Grant Weatherby came from the human world. He was not human, though, he was actually the son of Gaia – as in Gaia-the-goddess-of-Earth. He mostly stayed by himself, he was very thin, he had pale skin, pale blond hair, and pale blue eyes. Quiet and almost transparent: no wonder no one, either teacher or student, had taken much notice of him until it was almost too late: if the accidents kept the pace they picked up last summer, by now there would be no school left at all. It had taken our teachers the best part of the season to trace all the disastrous episodes to him, and when they finally did, they voted unanimously to expel Grant. The question, however, was: where to send him?

Technically, since he came from the world of humans, he should have been sent back there. However, now that they knew what he was capable of, they realized that he had to be the cause of global warming there. To send him back now, would mean to consciously sentence the humans to a premature end.

While they were busy discussing Grant’s fate, a bunch of us students befriended him, challenging the headmistress’ orders: Grant was to remain alone in his room until the school council had reached a decision. It’s not as if there were Gargoyles guarding his door, however, so we just went there at night, knocked, and entered. We brought snacks too. That was actually a good idea, because it led to us accidentally finding the way to solve the crisis and save Grant Wheaterby – and possibly many lives.

We sat on the floor: a couple of humans, a couple of fairies, a werewolf and a flying mermaid. We started chatting and joking, trying to cheer Grant up. He was really sad. He was aware that he was to blame for all that had happened, but he had not intentionally caused any of it. As unlikely as it seemed, they were all tragic accidents. He could not provide any explanation and he had no idea how to stop it.

“I may even harm you”, he said, on the verge of tears, “and of course I don’t want to, but apparently I can’t control what happens around me.”

“I hear you”, said Ian, the werewolf. “We need to understand what triggers you!”

“Nothing triggers me! Bad things just happen around me!” he exclaimed in frustration.

We welcomed his outburst with silence and he added, more quietly: “Let’s have some snacks.”

We all reached in our bags and passed around what we had: I had brought crisps, Sally the flying mermaid had some dried shrimps, Luna the night fairy had brought a bottle of night dew, and Daisy the flower fairy some fruit juice. We all stopped short when Grant offered us a drink from the bottle he pulled out of his night stand. It was full of some slimy-looking dark grey liquid. And when he uncapped it, we almost gagged.

“What is that… er… drink?” asked Luna.

“It’s bio carbon dioxide-added petroleum – that’s the technical name”, he said, pointing at the label. “But I usually refer to it as carbonated black oil juice. All natural, you know.” And he took a sip.

We cast glances at one another. No one had the courage to say what we were all thinking: it was the most disgusting thing we had ever seen labelled as food!

“Sounds… interesting…” Daisy stammered after a while. “Wouldn’t you like to taste some of this instead?” She handed him the bottle of fruit juice. “This is also all natural. It is a mix: apple, banana, apricot, and pineapple! Yummy – and healthy…” she added in a whisper.

Grant took the bottle and poured himself a glass of juice. “Nice colour”, he commented. “And the smell is not bad either.”

“Try mine!” Luna said, giving him some of her night dew.

“Uh, this is good”, he said after taking a sip. “Where did you get it?”

Before Luna could reply, Ian pulled some salted meat out of his backpack. “Wanna try this, now? I’m not sure I am brave enough to ask what you eat for lunch…”

“Oh, usually nothing elaborate”, Grant replied, accepting one stripe of salted meat. “Sometimes a coal sandwich seasoned with kerosene or something like that. Hey, this is tasty!”

“Hey Grant”, I couldn’t help saying at that point. “Ever thought of changing your diet? You seem to enjoy our food quite a bit.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, why not? You can come every night until they send me packing.”

I decided to say what I had been thinking in the past few minutes. “I believe that if you stop eating and drinking fossil fuel derivatives you may solve your problem.”

His head snapped towards me. “How so?”

I didn’t really know what I was talking about, it was just an intuition, but I tried my best to explain.

“Well, what we eat and drink has an effect on us and our health, right? I think in your case it also has an effect on your surroundings. That’s why all those things happen around you: it’s not you, it’s what is inside of you!”

After a moment of silence, the others started debating my hypothesis, making suggestions, elaborating on it. Grant kept looking at me and said nothing. I was starting to think I had somehow offended him, when he suddenly grinned at me.

“If what you say is right”, he said, “once I start eating the good stuff, I could help heal the world.”

We spent the rest of the night making wild plans on what he could do and how we could help him. He was radiating happiness and nothing remotely dangerous happened to any of us in all the time we spent in his room.

The following day I went to speak to the headmistress. I wanted to explain my idea to her. It didn’t feel right that Grant Weatherby would be expelled for something that wasn’t really his fault. Especially if it could be fixed! I mean, sure, my hypothesis had to be proved, but it was certainly worth a try.

When the headmistress opened the door, however, she didn’t even let me talk.

“Come see this”, she said, and pulled me inside her office. She had a small TV on and she was watching the news from the human world. Just like it happens in the movies, apparently every news channel was broadcasting the same piece of news: something unexplainable was going on on Earth!

The water in polluted rivers was suddenly flowing crystal clear; plastic in the oceans was slowly turning into seaweeds and corals; the rain was so clean it could be bottled and drunk… Scientists were being interviewed but none of them had an explanation.

“Where is Grant Weatherby?” I asked.

The headmistress turned to look at me and she had a big smile on her face. She handed me a note scribbled on a piece of paper.

“Apparently your friend trusted your intuition so much, that he secretly left during the night. You can guess the rest.”

*****

The Spot Writers—Our members:

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/

The Spot Writers – “Twins” by Val Muller

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This week’s tale comes to us from Val Muller, author of the kidlit Corgi Capers mystery series. This month’s prompt is to write anything involving global warming.

“Twins” by Val Muller

Blue looked at her wristband and could barely comprehend the green color it had turned. Her. The lottery. A winner.

Emmy, with a plain black bracelet, looked over in shock.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding,” Emmy said. “I’m going home.” She huffed out the door, presumably to her apartment.

The media portrayed it as the most important lottery you could ever win. Their outlook was clear: they had given up on Earth and any chance it had of healing. Their praise of the lottery painted a bleak picture for those who would remain, those like Emmy. Only the lucky few would be spared pain and suffering. And here was Blue, holding a ticket.

It was almost impossible to believe.

Registration for the lottery was voluntary, offered to those who passed the medical exams, as Blue and her sister had. The population had struggled to maintain its numbers at 3 billion for decades now, and Blue was one of the lucky few to be chosen for one of only 15,000 tickets aboard the Stellar Hope.

Emmy was not.

In a few short weeks, Blue would arrive at the medical facility to be cryogenically frozen. As a female, and based on her age, she was given odds greater than others, but as a twin, Emmy was too. It was perhaps the only time in her life Blue had been luckier than her twin. While the residents of Earth suffered in the rising global temperatures and struggled to grow enough food to eat and desalinate enough water with dwindling power sources, Blue and her 14,999 companions would travel through space for unspecified decades—or longer—until the ship’s AI detected a world comparable with life.

The pessimists—they would consider themselves the realists—worried that those on board would never wake up, would never find a planet suitable for life, would wander the cosmos until some catastrophic destruction took out Earth’s last hope.

And the optimists agreed this could be true, but the death would be a mere sleep, not the slow, suffering, heat-and-starvation death of being left on Earth. Worst case scenario, it would be euthanasia kissed with the sweet dream of hope.

And Blue had a ticket for it.

That afternoon, in preparation for leaving, Blue transferred all her remaining water rations to her sister, accessible through the plain black bracelet that refused to glow green with fortune. And then, of course, all the seeds she’d been saving, all the clothing and resources she’d salvaged. Emmy would be moving into Blue’s apartment—it was larger and more well-provisioned. She’d leave Emmy all her notebooks and scavenged books about crop techniques over the history of the Earth, about desalinization, about digging underground for resources, about strange creatures that had somehow seemed to survive since the dinosaurs.

But when Emmy finally returned, her annoyance at the mental load involved in remembering all these things countered Blue’s enthusiasm.

“You want me to continue your garden? Steward your seeds? Dig in the ground for—worms? What difference does it make?” Emmy asked, looking with disgust at the shelves of resources in her sister’s apartment, soon to be hers officially. “You’re trying to put out a forest fire by spitting on it. I’d rather walk into the flames.”

“But you aren’t, are you?” Blue asked.

“Aren’t what?” Emmy flipped open a notebook of seed sketches, skimming over the notes Blue had left.

“You aren’t going to walk into flames. Because—”

“What do you care? No matter what I do, you’ll be on a ship. You’ll either be sleeping peacefully forever, or you’ll wake up generations from now, in a place we wouldn’t even be able to imagine. How I spend the last of my days—or don’t spend them—doesn’t have any bearing on you, or us. The Earth will be forgotten, a lifeless desert, a new Mars. And you and the other thousands will be free.”

Emmy huffed down the hallway to spend the night on the sofa. In the morning, Blue would start her journey to the medical facility near the launch site, and the apartment would be Emmy’s entirely. But sleep eluded Blue. She thought about her rooftop garden, about the earthworm garden she was raising in the chiseled cellar under her house, of the trade she had established with cross-town neighbors who lived near the briny river. It was all documented in her notes, the life cycle of water, fish, plants, dirt, worms. They were all things that used to happen naturally and abundantly, but now… would Emmy do anything with it?

Blue tried to put herself to sleep by imaging the nicest thing she could, the most fantastic vision of the future. She tried to imagine beautiful worlds, lush rainforests, flowing water, humans at peace. She tried to imagine eating to abundance and drinking water chilled and flowing that it dripped down her chin.

But the image that kept coming to her mind was her own rooftop garden, the small trickle of greenery that sprang from her efforts, and the delight in biting into a single cherry tomato. The cryogenic sleep that awaited was a whitewashed blue Nothing against the warm orange glow of her warm planet. Someone would have to save the Earth, and it wasn’t going to be anyone on the Earth’s Hope.

In the morning, Emmy was surprised to be woken by a vibrating green bracelet, letting her know the transport would be waiting for her in just two hours’ time. Had there been a mistake? She rushed to Blue’s room to tell her sister the good news. But Blue, with a simple black bracelet, was sound asleep. She’d fallen asleep as usual poring over her notes about seeds and plants and things. The smile on her face was too serene for Emmy to wake her. She tiptoed out of Blue’s apartment, adjusting the glowing green bracelet that was just a little too big on her wrist, letting Blue remain in her dreamlike paradise as Emmy headed toward her own.

***

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

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/