The Long List Anthology Volume 7 by David Steffen

Author:David Steffen [Steffen, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Diabolical Plots, L.L.C.
Published: 2022-06-16T05:00:00+00:00

During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped about 1°C, on average. There are debates regarding the causes of these aberrant winters. At least one trigger may have been the mass death of people in North and South America, with ninety percent of the population, by some estimates, dead after contact with Europeans.

Lost languages and cities; toddlers and great grandmothers and handsome young men and dreamy girls; villages and trade routes and favorite jokes. After so many deaths, an area of agricultural land the size of France returned to forest. This regreening sequestered enough carbon from the preindustrial atmosphere that temperatures took centuries to recover and begin their steady rise to the present day. The wild and empty continent of later explorers was—in part—a sepulcher, a monument inscribed with languages they could not speak, full of witnesses to that terrible loss.

From the cold and darkness of a hundred million deaths, to the chilly woodsmen of the Valley of Song, to Paganini playing il Cannone Guarnerius, it is a long and terrible history.

At Kaatza, the disaster is slow, despite temporary changes in climate, because the smallpox that will ravage the coast has not yet arrived. People go about their business on the water and in the forest, from the Pacific coast to the Salish Sea. Children are born. Songs are composed. The nurse log disintegrates. The little spruce rooted there rises toward the light, its heartwood formed in an apocalypse.

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