Sea Ice

The glaciers are melting. Polar bears, bone thin, eat their young—this piece of information, this wrongness, irritates me like unseen things in the grass when I have lunch outside, when I have no one to sit with in the hallways. I wind my legs around the steel ones of my chair, bite inside both cheeks to stop the voice from getting in. With two months left 'til June, only a dozen of us have been showing up in class, as Mr. Robertson keeps pointing out.

After he leaves to grab printouts, most of us wait in silence. A few whisper and laugh. 

The loudest grow louder. “Who cares about polar bears?”

“They might as well get wiped out so the government can spend money on us instead of animals.”

Their friends titter with pinched expressions. They must have skipped when Ms. Gulati said humans are animals and technically one race. Or maybe they take Bio with Mr. Brasby, who naps red-faced at his desk. Humans aren't endangered, though. Not like the polar bears, Arctic foxes, or tundra wolves that wildlife photographs suggest walk endlessly through a landscape as white as they are. Nearly always alone.

Mr. Robertson says the snow is full of pollutants. The ice thins or melts too soon, fragmenting the terrain and stranding wildlife. Unable to mate or eat, they attack their own kind. I skip photos of these.

“They should allow seal hunting and whale fishing, too. It's not fair to only give permits to—”

Whaling. Indigenous peoples. I don't dare correct them out loud. 

Mr. Robertson returns and splits us into groups for presentations on ways to save Canada's North. “A future-thinking project.”

Those who wished extinction on polar bears ask questions, their eyes as wide as the glitter-filled plastic ones of those stuffed lemurs inhabiting every toy store.

Pressure grows behind my eyes; I try to calm them by staring at the blank whiteboard until class ends.



We leave in the same direction. At some point I break from my route home without realizing. They turn down a wooded lane into the park—not an oversized lawn like others in the city, but a chunk of real forest barely held in by townhouses and their too-high wooden fence panels. I count before turning.

Ahead, two guys punch each other while dodging and shouting. A plastic water bottle swings in a hand, flashing like a beacon. My classmates don't look back. 

Backpacks drop by the stream, marking territory. This stream bisects the park and, at its widest and centremost, lies in a basin ringed by trees on higher ground. I crouch behind an evergreen I can't name, feeling exposed.

“I saw Mr. Robertson riding his motorcycle to school this morning.” The speaker pulls a straw out of a pop can and pitches both into the water, one after the other. “He's pretty hot.”

“Even with the bike, Robertson's a hippie.”

“David's worse. Did you guys see his face when Robertson was going on about polar bears? He was like fucking crying.” A kick to a skunk cabbage accents the last word and tears apart the plant.

I lean forward as if it helps me hear.

No one says my name.

A zipper's whine signals departure. Hoods slip over hair, phones into pockets. What do not disappear are rectangles of foil bags on the ground and assignments in the water, their blue and black inks wafting softly off paper. Against dark greens and browns, the white and silver burn my eyes. I squeeze them shut.

Rather than being squeezed out, the pressure floods. I get to my feet as I'm forced outward, long and strange. Around me something falls to the forest floor like too-thin pine needles. New hair spreads across my body, my protruding face, glistening like the egg whites we beat into snow in Home Ec. I no longer blend in. With each step down the dirt slope I leave dark indentations behind.

The one who made the hippie comment sees first, before we collide. I knock another aside. One gestures with arms bent. My teeth sink into a wrist. Do I even taste blood, or only salt on their skin? I bite down harder, not knowing if my teeth are grinding strange flesh or my own mouth, and somehow feel as afraid as ever.

The others stand frozen in place. They're human children again, each a solitary figure perched on a fragment of ice. At any second the ice could shift, sliding them noiselessly into the sea. I cling to Mr. Robertson's words. 

The Great White North is melting, its inhabitants doomed—but for now all eyes are on me. I tell myself that's what matters. I tell myself I'm worthy and strong and free.

Monica Wang has writing in Electric Literature, Southword, Augur, and PULP Literature, among other publications. Born in Taichung, Taiwan, she grew up in Taipei and Vancouver, Canada, and moved to Germany in 2017. In 2021 she received a scholarship to the creative writing MA program at University of Exeter.