By Jess Golden
A polar bear dives under ice cap debris on my laptop screen, blue light drifting through her fur, and I imagine gliding like that, soft and slow through near-freezing saltwater. I 
run fingertips through my hair, hot and damp at the root. A phone buzz, another update: a second registered death. John’s bumping around in the next room, and I consider sending him the link. Instead, I move to grab the last ice pack. Skin slips and shines—I’m drowning in the waters and oils of myself. We don’t have AC because he won’t admit anything has changed. This used to be a place of roaring winters, of nostalgic-from-the-moment-they-began summers. Rainbow sprinkles coating ribbons of soft serve, sticky wrists and sandal tan lines. Another buzz: another historic temperature reached. Breathing feels like a chore and so does everything else. On the other side of the wall, a shatter of WWI artillery fires through outdated speakers. I turn my own sound up, listen to Arctic water slosh and slap. The polar bear paddles on and on and on. I push the ice pack between my thighs, clamp down on it and watch the bear surface for breath. She’s swum 60 miles, and I feel like I’ve come that far too, limbs lethargic and sore, and then the voiceover says there won’t be enough solid ice for a rest this time—it’s melting these days—and the camera pans out on a shrinking, paddling body surrounded by so much blue, a color stretched out past its borders, a stunning abstraction that saves me from having to watch her sink beneath the waves.
Jess Golden is an American fiction writer with a preference for flash and a tendency to move around a lot. At the moment, she can be found in Istanbul. Her stories have previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, Passages North, Fictive Dream, Maudlin House, Wigleaf’s Top 50, and elsewhere.
MoonPark Review 