Permafrost Melting

Kallik thrust her hand up through the half-melted earth. Air licked her dirty fingertips, and the slight touch of the summer sun sent a shockwave of urgency through her body. Rapidly she began to free the rest of her body from the cold, rocky, Greenlandic soil. Kallik scraped handfuls from her face until it was clear enough for her to wrench her eyes open. They stung as white light encompassed her vision.

Her neurons fired faster than they had in hundreds of years. With her tongue, she pried her lips open, and sucked in her first breath in a millennium. The first thaw in thousands of years tasted crisp on her tongue, like the afterlife was whispering to her through the northern wind, “Finally, it’s time to set you free.”

She sat up in her shallow grave, and the cracking of her icy bones echoed through the small valley. Shakily, as small bits of earth crumbled out of her hair fell into a small patch of melting snow, she stood, and cocked her head to the side. The austere sting of the world against her bare feet once had made her crumble to her knees.

Looking down, her skin was nearly translucent. There were no sensations in her body except the itching discomfort of cells waking up, desperate to generate warmth, to no avail, and the pale heat from the glowing sun, so she allowed the light to slough off an abandoned eternity as she began a stumbling pilgrimage south.