Antarctica’s end
Death and new life – it happens all the time and it is never easy.
Milky white, flawless carpet embraces his slowly breaking heart. An ache slices through the blanket that protects him from the sudden truth. Mum is dying.
His face reflects the midnight sun, brightness highlighting his grief. Snowflakes mingle with salty tears. Mind stripped. Memories buried.
Trying to feel nothing, now.
Too late to leave and catch her final breath. Antarctica’s frozen pathways close all escape routes, plunging him into perpetual darkness, suffocating him.
Across the ice, the Emperor waits, bolt upright, regal. Stately, silent in the snow, he’s stationary, protecting his offspring. Warm egg left at his feet by his mate. Avocado-shaped and greenish white, this egg is precious. Watching the figure across the ice, the Emperor senses something new. Human grief.
*
Halley Research Station. Pool tables and pints. Some stretching and preening – muscles popping, wanting to stay in tip top condition. Other bodies tucked up together, rolling cigarettes and lurching about the pods on legs, looking for an episode that could be launched into a lively anecdote when the crew return to Blighty.
This man stands apart. His pencil blunt, his hands, callused and torn by manual work. Privacy is a prize in a place short of space, but they’ve offered him a nest to deconstruct his dreams in. His pencil scribbles news, messages from loved ones. His fragile paper is folded, and tucked inside his jacket, close to his heart.
*
Imagining the scene in the late-night ward. Her breath is weak. Her hands bruised from the cannulas’ needles. Sobbing patients fearing the inevitable – family and friends long gone. Still, she sits beside their mother – breathing in, breathing out, in unison. A final duet that draws them closer, as they step up to close the curtain one more time.
*
Another day. Another struggle to find a signal. His sister still sitting in the hospital ward, but the bed is empty, stripped of the flesh and form of their mother. Machines unplugged. Body gone. Her spirit lingered, dazzling the sterile air for a moment – a cascade of stars falling from the skies. A solitary star ascending to a better place.
She’s gone, she says. He catches his breath and stifles a sob. No wish to increase her desperation as she seeks to find a way through this darkness.
The silhouette of the science station is bleak against the sun’s bright backdrop. Hayley stands on stilts and rocks gently – mirroring the grief shared by brother and sister.
Crunching tracks into the snow’s perfection, he runs, footprints chasing him across the empty landscape. Far away, the Emperor penguin maintains its composure, unruffled by the gasping agony of the worker as he leaves behind a pattern of footprints, pacing in circles, wider and wider and never-ending.
Crunched-up paper, strewn with pencil scrawl, crossings out and doodles scribbled in the long periods of radio silence that have punctuated these desperate days of perpetual light.
Nestled deep within the Emperor’s brood pouch, a new life waits patiently for its turn.