The Ice Wall Shuffle

The two figures stood on a sheet of ice covered with fresh snow. Small flakes drifted lazily down from a white sky, through white air, against a white backdrop and landed on the white ground.

“You told me it would be here.”

The fat penguin looked down his round spectacles at the ice map. “It should be.” He turned the map sideways and squinted. “We took a left at the lizard people dig site, right?”

“Yes, just after we took a right at the south entrance of the pyramid complex. Both perfectly good alternatives to whatever it is we’re doing now by the way,” said the slender one with the perpetually annoyed air.

“Then I don’t understand it. All I see is ice fields.”

“Tell me again how you heard about this?”

“I’ve told you a hundred times. Jerry stole one of those moving screens from the humans while they were watching the diving competition. On the moving screen he found a video—”

“With a very passionate, or angry, hard to tell, human, laying out the exact route to the ice wall,” continued the annoyed one with a practiced air.

“At the edge of the world that would prove the Earth is flat!” said the fat one.

“And why again do we need proof the Earth is flat? Does it look round to you?”

“No, but the calm woman on the other video seemed quite sure it was round. She had a lot of convincing arguments.”

“Which were?”

“Did you see a rock that kind of looked like the infinity symbol?” asked the fat one, holding the map up almost to his spectacles.

“No. I saw the one with the free mason symbol.”

“That was the Illuminati symbol.”

“What were the arguments?”

“Oh… I don’t remember any of them, but they were convincing… Then again,” the fat one added, “the angry one did say their society had members all around the globe, so they must have some proof… They did have that argument about flights never traveling over the South Pole because there is no South Pole. And think about it, we never see any humans flying over us.”

“Flying? Flying?! Those things don’t even have wings big enough to swim let alone fly. Have you seen them on land? Giant orange blobs that can’t even walk straight in snow.”

“Wait a second.” The fat one turned the ice map upside down and pulled out a compass. “I knew I copied this right. He said the readings would get screwier the closer we got to the South Pole, so we need to wait till night and align ourselves by the North Star instead.”

“You just said there was no South Pole.”

“That was at a different part of the video. Trust me, if we just retrace our steps and then shuffle for another fifteen days, we’ll reach the ice wall.”

“Fifteen days? We were supposed to be there already. How can we be fifteen days off course?”

The fat one shrugged. “I thought the measurements were in meters, but it’s kilometers.”

The slender penguin just stared at his companion. Finally, he said, “You’re making less sense than the guy who said the pyramids were made using 4-kilometer ramps.”

“Do you want to navigate?” The fat one proffered the map and compass. After a moment he said, “that’s what I thought.” He folded and pocketed both items and shuffled excitedly back the way they had come. “We can still make it by the equinox,” he called over his shoulder.

The slender one followed resignedly, muttering to himself, “I should’ve just done my paper on that Stanley Kubrick movie about humans landing on the Moon.”