Short Story

by Ava Z

The girl had never been fond of the taste of fish and its variations. In fact, she despised it, as she had with her mother.. To her six-year-old brain, her mother was the bane of her existence. She had the tendency to shout, accompanied with a twinkle of annoyance in her eyes at all times. Not only had her mother repeatedly scolded her when she found her daughter scarfing down food from her pantry, she was furious when the girl refused to touch the oozing salmon she had spent hours preparing.

Years later, the girl had moved out, sighing with relief. She reached into her pocket to retrieve her pack of Marlboro, lighting one of them as she eased herself on a bench. It had become a daily habit for her, as she had witnessed her father with the same habit as she peeked through the curtains nearly two decades ago. It was an awful way of life, as she had acknowledged. The girl had always been an animal lover and as she stared into the distance, she wondered if the cigarette in her mouth was worth polluting the city. As she took the bus back to her one-person apartment, she began to pack for her abroad trip to China. As she rummaged through her mess of a room, she suddenly spotted two beady eyes staring directly at her. She timidly grabbed the figure, just to reveal the scrawny, dirty polar bear plushie that her mother had gifted her all those years ago. A wave of unusual nostalgia immediately came over her for no apparent reason. Had she not despised her mother all those years ago? She hurriedly stuffed it in her bag as she rushed to the airport.

The girl had never taken into account the immense smoking and pollution problem that Beijing had been facing, up until she smelled the familiar stench in the streets. From this, she had been reminded of the miniature polar bear in her bag, to which she assumed smelled like tobacco from the whiff of the city. She looked at it for quite a while, and began to ponder how they truly felt about everything going around in the world. She stomped out her cigarette and threw the pack away.

She had seen various ads around the city that discouraged smoking, alongside cigarette packs drawn with some reference to climate change with a sad polar bear on the front cover. The girl took this opportunity as a wake-up call and decided to attend climate change informative classes once she reached her hometown again.

As the classes continued to advocate for the effects of climate change and its effects on the innocent polar bears slowly dying out in the Arctic, the girl was reminded of her mother once again. She remembered the way she took her for granted as she had cooked fish that the polar bears were losing, how she used to get angry at her for not appreciating the food that was in the house, and for neglecting the issues that needed to be addressed throughout the world.

She became her very own advocate for these climate issues and began to educate young people on the effects of smoking and the pollution that it allowed for, influencing the lives of polar bears and other mammals.

She clutched onto her stuffed animal at her mother’s funeral.