Home Is The Warmest Place On Earth

• Kevin Hong, Grade 12, Ringwood Secondary College -
• Short Story
• 2018

Excellence Award in the 'Write Along 2018' competition

Every morning, the sun peered over the infinitely faraway horizon, blanching the sky and ocean a milky white like the shade of their fur, or the two- by three-metre ice floe on which they floated. The polar bears stirred at the first touch of light on their cold, stiff bodies. They were a family of two; the mother, curled up around her cub, gently lifted her head towards the sun, basking for a moment in the warmth that the new day brought.
But it also brought along the fears and woes that came with life on the floe. With each new day, the bounds of their small home grew smaller by a few centimetres, and the arctic waters crept closer and closer around them.
Weeks had passed since they broke off from what remained of the glacier, swept away by the swelling tidewater that had opened an irreparable rift in their lives. It was the last time she saw her husband, who had left to go hunting that morning to feed their growing cub.
‘When is Papa coming back? When are we going home?’ the cub often asked as she lulled him to sleep every night.
‘Soon, my dear, sooner than you can learn how to catch a seal.’
‘But I don’t want to catch a seal! I can’t see any around here, anyway. All I want is to play in my den and roll around in the snow with Papa.’
‘I know, darling, I know. How I wish we could go back home and be reunited with your Papa. Back to how everything used to be…’ She sat him on her lap, and there they snuggled in the centre of the floe, keeping the ice beneath them in equilibrium with a mother’s faltering hopes and a child’s naïve curiosity.
More recently, however, the cub began to ask, ‘Mama, is this going to be our home from now on?’ Admittedly, she didn’t have a good response to that one. Her lies were dwindling like the pile of fish she had gathered for food, and yet her son’s hunger for answers only seemed to grow with each question. Sooner or later, she would have to accept the truth: they were never going back.
The ice cracked then, a giant zigzag severing the floe into two jagged halves and sending the bears plunging into the ocean below. The cub floundered in the water for a moment before latching onto a piece of drifting ice. ‘Ma-ma, I’m c-cold,’ he chattered. ‘And now our home is g-gone too…’
She paddled across to him and wrapped her paws around his quivering body. ‘It may be broken and adrift, but there is no place warmer than home on earth, my dear.’
They both turned to face the distant horizon. ‘Mama, what’s that?’ the cub exclaimed suddenly.
There, in the warm pool of afternoon sunshine, was the silhouette of a big ship slowly sailing towards them.
‘Home,’ the mother bear said. ‘It’s come to take us home.’