Degrees

The temperatures are getting old around here. The ones who hit their seventies are still very pretty, but the eighties sweat all over the carpet and the nineties' tongues are lagging out. The sun wants to put all of them in a nice greenhouse, where plants will look after them, but the mountains and trees won't listen. They remember those kids The Ice Ages, who threw snowballs at their trunks and topped them with everlasting frost. Mercury is up and down about the whole thing within thermometers. The degrees still talk about the one time they killed a whole busload of children, who'd left their windows closed while sleeping, and cackle over the deserts they created when people weren't expecting them, who then died of thirst. Wouldn't they be better off in the pages of a story, then? A fairy tale where a prince of a northern tundra asks his greatest explorers to find a warm place to live. They meet tiny babies of weather who exhale white mists in their faces. Cracked ice, lakes of freezing water, mad wolves, falling icicles, improper clothing, lips frozen to telephone poles: all these dangers kill some but do not stop the rest. In a valley faraway they discover the dinosaur jungle resort, where 70s wear tiny bathing suits and 80s give them cups of water from sparkling fountains of youth.