(A word from an author: This is my very first short story translated to English! Please, excuse me for my mistakes and bad spelling, I'll try hard to become better and better :-) Don't be shy to tell me what I did wrong, I'd appreciate that! Actually, I'm Czech, but there aren't many Czech readers here, so I'm now on going to translate my stories for you.)
It is cold no more at the north pole.
'We should die when everybody else did.' says a girl with deep circles under her eyes to a grey haired elderly man.
'Why do you think so, miss?' he asks while looking at his wrist watch. How much time is it? As usually, too late. Too late.
'If we died at the same time as the others, we wouldn't have to stay here and play a game we cannot win.' she explains, leaning her back on rusty metal wall separating the inner and outer deck. This icebreaker ship'll never be any use again; there is no ice left to break. The girl feels how much she's sweating right now. She unbuttons her shirt another bit and gazes at the horizon. The world is getting lighter and lighter, sky shines like a halo.
It's almost beautiful -
- this damn morning.
'Here comes the sun... here comes the sun and I say...' the man hums to himself after few minutes of painful silence and the girl giggles hysterically. She pushes herself from the wall to the deck railing. A sudden wave of steam rising from the ocean almost burns her, at the last second she fortunately stops her movement. She notices that the water surface is full of swarming air bubbles. The ocean starts to boil. She closes her eyes as the fear appears after she's been sure, that nothing can scare her anymore. Few tears stream down her cheeks and mix with drops of sweat. After she manages to defeat that unexpected weakness, she turns her face at the East.
'Come on, you blistering bastard! Come on and make us burn like the rest of this goddamn planet!' she cries at the approaching dawn.
'Everything's gonna be all right, miss.' says the man, taking her hand and making her go farther from the edge of the deck.
'Everything's gonna be all right...' she re-echoes as she puts on exhausted face and sits on the rusty deck. The man sits next to her, carefully crooking his old joints. He takes off his thousand times repaired glasses.
'Do you believe in God, miss?' he asks, smiling.
'If I did, would He save me now?' she replies.
'I believe he would.'
'Will He save you?'
'I believe He will.'
'Well, then I'm gonna believe too. That He'll save you.' she forces herself to smile back.
The girl embraces her last minutes and seconds of existence. Her eyes are busy exploring the world around. Water drops look like little diamonds, steam covers the surroundings like a thick fog, few reflector stripes shine red on the rusty cockpit wall.
'It looks a bit like that morning...' she whispers to herself.
'Tell me about that morning, please.' says the man.
'You okay to spend your last moments listening to nostalgic childhood story of someone so much younger?' she asks, grinning.
He nods.
'Oh, man... So I better start. At the begging I guess I should tell you about daddy.
My father was really not any kind of what you'd call a wizard. Actually, he worked at a bicycle store. In our garage, there was this big box full of broken wheel reflectors. I loved them, I loved the way every ray of light made them shine red. I used to play with the reflectors all the time. A wierd little lady, wasn't I?
Then, suddenly the box disappeared.
I came to ask my father, where the reflectors were. He told me, that a mighty wizard came to our house to borrow them for a while. Of course I didn't believe every word he said. I was almost six years old, slowly losing faith in magic and other stuff like that. But I didn't have the courage to call my daddy a liar, so I acted like I believed him.
Few days passed and I thought, that I'll never see my beloved reflectors again, but then one morning, my father came to wake me up really early. He carried me on his shoulders through the fog outside, it was really dark and scary. We walked for what seemed like an eternity to me and I started to be annoyed. Finally, we arrived at the place.
I asked daddy, what we were doing there. He told me just to wait for a little moment.
Just for a little while.
Suddenly, the sun rose up the horizon and rays made their way through that thick morning fog. Under the hill we were standing at, a hundreds of little red flowers made of wheel reflectors appeared. Just me, my father, milky white fog and the shining flowerfield. I almost stopped breathing.
And daddy was laughing like a madman, shouting:
'Abracadabra!'
And again:
'Abracadabra!'
And he made me believe in magic again.
From this one morning, I came there countless times to wait for the Sun to come and conjure up all those flowers, while I was screaming abracadabra, feeling so mighty, so powerful...'