by Erin Halfelven
The aisles of the warehouse store wound around like a worm committing self-abuse. High up on one shelf sat a fifty-five gallon drum. All frosty white and silver on a midnight blue and black background, letters spelled out "Winter" like that was the name of a new energy drink.
"Why would anyone want a can of Winter that big?" asked little Jodie.
"Suppose you wanted to make it winter all over the world, all at once?" asked his father.
"I think you'd need a lot more than one can," said Jodie's older sister, Minerva.
"Well, yes," said their father. "You'd need a lot of cans all over the world, hundreds or thousands of them, probably. Then you could open all the cans at once.
"Normally, it's only winter at the north end of the world, or the south. But if you had enough cans of Winter, you could make it freezing cold, north and south, and even in the middle."
The children nodded. Their father was wise, if a little strange. They remembered when he had taught them how to use tiny demolition charges to blow up their toys. Little pieces of Transformers and Bratz blown sky-high, while they watched wearing their safety goggles behind barriers made of steel-reinforced Legos.
Then he'd shown them his collection of extra-terrestrial lifeforms in plastic polymer solutions that carried more oxygen than water ever could. The tiny, teddy bear flower fish had been Jodie's favorite, so cute and pretty, all mauve and gold and raspberry. Miranda had preferred the bigger dart fish, pulling in its prey on a poisoned needle at the end of a line it shot out of its own body. When it ate the teddy bear flower, of course, little Jodie had cried.
But now, the idea of winter all over the world, all at once, had them fascinated and horrified all over again.
"How cold would it get, Daddy," asked Jodie.
"If you kept opening more cans of Winter," said his father, "it would just keep getting colder. Cold enough and the air would begin to freeze. First the water vapor would fall out as snow, several feet deep. And the oceans would freeze from the top down, though there might be liquid under the ice for a long time.
"Then the carbon dioxide would freeze, a layer of another kind of snow on top of the water ice and frozen oceans. Then the nitrogen would freeze out, making a slush mixture with liquid oxygen. And aliens would come in big ships to buy the frozen air, taking it away in cubic-mile-size snocones."
"What flavor?" asked Miranda.
"A sort of salty raspberry, I expect," said her father.
Comments
A little quirky and a lot of fun
A little quirky and a lot of fun. Hmmmmmm... salty raspberry could be an interesting flavour!
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Another of my odd dreams
I expect I got a bit cold last night. And I hate raspberry as a flavor. The fruit itself is good but raspberry-flavored stuff is always too sweet and mediciney. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Fritz Leiber
??? I think he had one called "A Pail of Air" or something where the raspberroies had fruited.
I've read that one
Perhaps it wormed its way up out of my subconscious.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
But...
..it's what you do after you get the idea that makes it worth reading.
A lot of quirky
but still lots of fun. I've heard of imagination running wild but...
Oh; you forgot, "Once upon a time..."
Susie
More like...
Once upon a mattress. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Pyrotechnics and ET
Little pieces of Transformers and Bratz blown sky-high, while they watched wearing their safety goggles behind barriers made of steel-reinforced Legos.
I almost have to duck from the debris flying past my head. But the salty raspberry...a giant slush ball of epic and tragic proportions. Thanks for this!
Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena
Love, Andrea Lena
You're welcome
The rest of the dream was even weirder, involving myself and two friends driving around a huge auto-mall and getting lost. Which is a sure sign in my dreams that I need to get up and take care of business. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I liked this, funny, quirky
It reminds me of a line I read in a comic. I can't remember which one though.
"Why do monsters eat humans?, That's easy humans are mostly made of water, now put a nice popping casing over them that's our skin and then look at our diet, too much salt, sugar and fat. Add in some crunchy bones and some creamy insides and being slightly meaty...face it humans are like the ultimate snack food of the monsters in the universe."
I found that funnily true. Now we've got salty raspberry snow cones for desert!
Bailey Summers
Sort of like pork rinds
I see. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
A Dream of Winter
Is very off-beat and funny.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
Thanks, Stan :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
This is so freakin' odd, I Love It!
[email protected] Dali, Disney, and Asimov walk into a bar...
Fantastic!
Huge Hugs,
Jonelle
[email protected]
They all get old-fashioneds and take a booth
"Have you ever noticed," says Walt, "there's always one cute little ice cube that melts faster than the others?"
"That shouldn't happen," says Isaac. "A mixture like that would be at thermal equilibrium very quickly."
"Have I ever told you," says Salvador, "the bartender here is one of my students?"
:)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
What's he mixing into those drinks?
[email protected] I'll take three!!! And keep 'em coming!
More Hugs,
Jonelle
[email protected]
here i thought i was the only one
who had the really odd dreams. fun little piece
We All Do!
[email protected] Some just remember more than others.
We Are The Lucky Ones!!!
Hugs,
Jonelle
[email protected]
It's sometimes easier than others
But I do usually remember my dreams, at least for awhile after I wake up. They aren't always this colorful. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
CosMart?
The dad seems like the kind of eccentric that raises bright confident iconoclastic kids that aggravate their more uptight & by the book teachers (like maybe Frank Zappa, although without all the poisonous negativity....). And a warehouse store that sells winter? What else would they sell? Tesseracts and portable holes by the gross. Everyone thinks of obscure little dusty shops being strange and magical, by a place like this seems like it'd have groundbreaking potential for some weird story series or universe. I picture it having customers from all over time and space as well as regular folks. Your Winter-in-a-Can stuff reminds me of the time my dad brought some ice-nine from work at General Dynamics and let us kids mess around tossing crumbs of it into buckets of water and watching them instantly freeze up solid; warning us not to let them get to the water table or we'd destroy the whole planet, and of course we were messing around and not listening and almost did and boy did we ever get in trouble!
~~~hugs, Laika
"Government will only recognize 2 genders, male + female,
as assigned at birth-" (In his own words:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1lugbpMKDU
Laikea?
In the dream, it was actually an Ikea that sort of morphed into a CostCo-type store. I'm not sure I could write more about that father, he seems to have escaped from a Heinlein story somewhere. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Heinlein?
Discount Troopers? The Electronics Department Manager is a Harsh Mistress? Shopping Cart Galileo? Or my personal favorite, Stranger in a Strange Aisle!
Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena
Love, Andrea Lena
CoCost: A Membership Store
Hmmmm? With all the evil cropping up hither and thither. I wonder if they sell 55 gallon drums of WhoopAss.
Cleanup on Aisle NIne
Somebody spilled WhoopAss all over the Lawn and Garden department! Watch out for the pruning shears! :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Sealed and delivered
JUST CAN IT EVERYONE, THAT WAS ENOUGH.
Move along, move along
Summer waiting for spring and summer are waiting for fall. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Hi Erin!
I see that I didn't make a nerd comment on this chapter. I can't let that remain true!
Evidence has it that there have been 2 "snowball Earths" like 1.5 G yrs. ago and 900M YA. Those dates might be way off; my memory's getting foggier! I think it was the angle of the Earth axis (to a line perpendicular to our orbit), called obliquity, increased a little, the orbit became a little more elliptical and maybe the Sun's output declined slightly. These factors brought somewhat hotter summers and significantly colder winters; the year round amount of ice and snow increased, increasing Earth's albedo. That lead to less sunlight warming the Earth, so more snow stayed and things spiraled colder. With the Earth covered, there was very little life, just phytoplankton under the ice. Even as the obliquity and orbital eccentricity cyclically declined, the high albedo kept sunlight from warming the planet. The Earth ave. temp. was estimated at -40°. At that temp. there was very little H2O vapor in the air, so less greenhouse effect, but there was also no precipitation.
The snowball condition was broken by CO2 from volcanos over 10s of K years or more. Usually most of this is washed from the atmosphere by rain, etc., but there was no precip. Eventually, there was enough greenhouse effect to warm the planet up again and there followed millennia of rain and a period of very high temperatures from the remaining CO2 and new water vapor.
Hugs and Bright Blessings,
Renee
Speaking of winter...
Was just re-reading a science book written during the mid 80s. The book made the point that the Earth is in the middle of an Ice Epoch with recurrent Ice Ages as long as 100,000 years separated by warm interglacials of about 10-15,000 years. We're 11,000 years into the current one of those. But the book pointed out that with all the carbon dioxide and other gases being released by industrial practices that it is likely we have already saved ourselves from a new Ice Age. Even global warming could have a silver lining. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.