Story-by-photo contest #6 - Be afraid of your desires because they are fulfilled - post 1 in en

"It can't be!", - Jonah exclaimed, getting up early in the morning and, as usual, first of all going to the window of his bedroom. His eyes, fringed with white eyelashes, noticeably rounded when he realized that the source of such a light effect was thin ice crystals on the glass from the outside of the window, and not in the sky outside the window, as it seemed to him at first.

Jonah was exhausted by the endless heat, because he could not spend all the time in a room with a working air conditioner. He worked as a peddler of soft drinks and some related products on the city beach, where even at night there was no lumen from people just standing in the water to facilitate their existence. The heat lasted for a long time and forecasts did not promise that it would ever be replaced by normal weather for subtropics.

The phone beeped. An ever-giggling girlfriend called to joke that when he woke up, he should switch the air conditioner to heating, and then he climbed out from under the covers. There was also a joke about the blanket, because for two months all the blankets had been lying rolled up on the shelves in the closet. Jonah opened the window and frosty air rushed into the room. Exactly the same as he was on his last trip to a country where there is a cold winter. From the window she could see the edge of the beach, deserted by morning, with some kind of white coating on the sand, And she realized that it was frost above the surf line.

Today he had a day off and he planned to repair the cooling system in his polar bear suit, wearing which he not only entertained the audience who were stupefied by the heat, but also saved himself. Jonah was an albino without a single drop of pigment in his skin, eyes and hair. He was not allowed to be in the sun at all without glasses and clothes. This suit, which he designed and sewed himself, was his most reliable shelter this summer, until the cooling system created according to the scheme of space suits failed. At first, he thought about how to get a spacesuit to survive in this heat, but it turned out to be difficult and the idea of creating such a suit appeared. The fur of the outer layer kept the cold well and did not let heat through. Anyway, it looked funny when he walked under the palm trees. Drinks did not have time to warm up, it was so interesting to buy them for vacationers from this polar bear. Someone felt sorry for him, thinking that he was suffering in this natural skin, but he did not give away the secret of the presence of a cooling system and was going to patent his invention of such a suit.

Another call. A friend told him to turn on the TV. Already chilled And she closed the window, took a blanket from the shelf, wrapped himself in it and turned on the news channel. "It can't be, but it happened," yelled some correspondent, jumping up from the cold near the icy fountain, rounding his already round eyes. Then there was a roundtable with eternally opposing groups of scientists supporting the theory of global warming and their opponents from the group that promoted the idea of global cooling. The latter were finally satisfied, and the former were hysterical, trying to convince the latter and the public that this was some kind of ridiculous mistake or someone's climatic trick that could not last for a long time and everything was about to start melting, drying out and burning from the heat. Even the chilled seagulls, who came from nowhere on the round table, laughed at them.

And then Jonah remembered...! Yesterday, at the end of the work shift, he felt very ill in a heavy bear skin, the weight of which he almost did not feel when the cooling system was working normally. Sitting down on some hillock in the sand, he opened an already empty refrigerator container, took off his mittens and plunging his hands into the ice, he called to heaven to finally send cold from there, confirming the human cry with a bear howl, which he imperceptibly mastered while wearing this bear skin. Soon he returned home and collapsed on the sofa under the air conditioner and fell asleep without even having dinner. And in the morning he saw a glow on his window...

"Did I really do it?!", Jonah exclaimed aloud and went back to the window. Astonished townspeople have already appeared on the beach, accustomed to being stuck in the water from morning to night. Even from afar, it was noticeable that people were shackled not only by the cold, but also by the horror that was coming with it. When Jonah saw that a group of boys on the beach were kicking at each other with icy jellyfish, messages came from the TV that the cold belt was already spreading to the Equator. Here he presented dying birds, plants, flowers, animals that do not know winter and frost-resistant animals from the northern parts of the planet replacing them. All this horrified him already and he realized what he had to try to do.

Taking his bear suit out of his bag, since he had no other warm clothes, and putting it on, Jonah went to the beach to try to find the very hillock, sitting on which he called to heaven for his salvation. It was difficult because he did not remember exactly this place, and then he was shaking from fatigue in different directions.

Clicking his claws on the already slippery paving slabs, he came out on the sand, which did not bend under his feet, freezing, he kept the traces of everyone who stepped on him before the onset of frost. It was difficult to walk. Stumbling, he reached the surf line, the edge of which was already covered with ice blocks, sparkling in the rays of the non-warming sun. Thinking about this, Jonah went to the left, to the palm tree, which seemed to him something noticeable, and really saw a pyramidal bump with a dent on the top of his head, left by his own ass, in the place where her evening shadow should have lain. There was even a trace of a tail. Jonah stood in front of the pyramid and understood why he hadn't noticed it before. It was made of wet sand by one of the vacationers and oriented exactly to the cardinal directions. On the northern edge, he saw the autograph of its creator, but could not decipher it. Sitting down, as yesterday, on the pyramid facing the ocean, he mentally began to ask forgiveness from heaven for his selfish prayers yesterday and asked to return everything as it was, if it was possible, of course.

At that moment, the sea seemed to freeze, and the ice cracked in the surf. After a while, the sand began to acquire a normal color and becomes moist from the frost settling on it. The bear's skin did not allow you to feel the temperature changes in the air, but it was visually clear that warming had already begun. The pyramids loosened, collapsed, and Jonah fell to the sand. When he got up, he took off the bear's head and put his white muzzle under the already warm rays of the sun with the thought "and let them burn me for everything I've done, and let my skin peel off!". Jonah was smiling his happiest smile for the first time in days.

After calming down and making sure that the warming process continues, he remembered that during this weekend he had to fix the cooling system in the bearskin, and hurried home, leaving his bear tracks on the wet sand.

The original text in Russian

Оригинал текста на русском языке

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