Sleek days, these, run through our hands like thin gelatin.
I’ve been everywhere except Antarctica the past timeslip, where by the way I’m pretty sure that I lived. Right around when the same thing happening now was happening then. Then we knew it was the Earth’s cycle. Today we’re not sure, and the reason it doesn’t matter is that since we say we don’t know, and it may be about us, it probably is, the only prudent thing to do is to chill out; just in case. But I am not one to talk, living in my cozy hive of transistors.
On that gallant continent, I was born and grew; and departed many times and returned; and lived the last few hours of my life there and died in a cave. The last living thing I saw was a deer. I chose to stay behind, while my wife went to Spain and my ship’s crew rose one of its own to captain and sailed on. I did not want to leave; I could not do something that seemed so outrageous as to abandon the land. We were told that we didn’t have a choice then. As the Earth cooled and the oceans froze, we knew it would not be habitable. An entire continent evacuated, about one century sooner than was really necessary; so that it would happen at all. Our leaders understood human nature. Today this place is thought of as a frozen wasteland never lived in by humanity; yet which is melting in a probable return to its prior and periodic state: a lush paradise.
At the bottom of the ice, there will be artifacts.
Now I remember: the last living thing I saw was a coyote. Then there were two.
