Fiction: Snow

[Rowsbette]

[IMAGE=LEFT]http://content.alternativenation.net/gallery/files/5/8/4/1/WhiteSmall.jpg[/IMAGE]
It should’ve been snowing the day I fell apart. Instead it was an indecisive bastard of an afternoon: all blanched sky and bleak sunlight. Only the true romantics pray they get the right weather for their descent into madness.

Today’s much the same: the sky so startlingly white that you can barely see the thin line of horizon where it meets the snow. It’s been three days since I left the cottage, and it gets worse every night. You’d think with this much insulation I’d be relatively comfortable, but when darkness falls the biting cold penetrates every inch of flab, and coats my bones with a thin layer of frost. Think that’s a metaphor? I’ve quite literally been sweating ice crystals.

It seemed to appear from nowhere, this monstrous jelly-belly of mine. I should spout the usual fat-man cliché of not knowing where it all came from, but I could hazard a guess. Inch-thick butter on every scone. Vats of hot, creamy milk. Full-fat Coke. Your wife isn’t wrong when she calls you a greedy bastard.

A smudge appears on the very farthest horizon: the sole blemish on the landscape’s otherwise flawless pallor. Said smudge appears to be moving.

It was the flights that finally did it for my head. You can expect the turbulence, but you never get used to it. S’all part of the job description. The worst parts come when you’re being tossed back and forth between two wrestling sides of a storm: zooming through a nightmare blizzard until your poor wee vessel becomes engulfed in cloud or snow and everything fades into a long, pale blur. All too often I black out—or white out, I guess—during these episodes: eventually shaken to my senses to find myself gripping the steering with whitened knuckles, reciting the Lord's Prayer under my breath… as if it were some dark incantation and not the salvation I so desperately wanted it to be. And I’m considered one of the most stable! It reminds me of war in some ways: the horrific uncertainty, the subsequent hysteria. Despite my repeated warnings, the new employees invariably soil themselves in fright.

There’s something eerie about the solitude of this place, huge areas of nothingness all smothered in a thick blanket of silence. Paradoxical, too: the freedom of the place is exhilarating, and yet it slays you with its utter, debilitating loneliness. Personally I reckon that whole Arctic isolation thing is what made The Thing such a terrifying movie; that, and that horrible human-head-growing-legs monstrosity. I imagine lesser men would have no trouble going all Shining-era Jack Nicholson in this place too. It’s just got that atmosphere.

Our daughter didn’t adapt to it very easily, although she loved the Arctic landscape in the moonlight. One night, she snuck out of our house for a midnight stroll: shimmying down a rope ladder she’d hooked onto her bedroom windowsill. It’d only been snowing lightly when she left, but she’d barely walked ten feet when a treacherous storm began to whisk the night air into a frenzy. Within minutes, the wind had snatched away the rope ladder and carried it far across the icy plains. Her means to get back inside lost, my daughter struggled back to the cottage and began banging, banging, banging on the front door. Both my wife and I were awake at the time, but the wind was making such a racket (hissing down the chimney, rattling at the shutters) that we simply didn’t notice. In the morning, we unlatched the thrice-bolted front door to have our only daughter clatter forward onto the old “Welcome” doormat: cold, stiff, and with crystallised tears still shimmering on her porcelain face.

It didn’t affect us as much as you’d expect. I guess we’ve adapted to the coldness of the place.

The blur in the distance resolves itself into a tiny green figure. It reminds me of the Playmobil photographer my daughter used to play with: his curling moustache and old-fashioned cases led us to name him Pierre. Casual stereotypes aren’t so bad, I guess.

Worse than what happened to my daughter, is what’s happening to my wife. Every day I walk into the kitchen to find her staring at the forlorn panorama beyond the window: the dinner burning, the spuds lying abandoned and unpeeled. Every day she turns to me with eyes so full of snow and blackness that they seem impossibly deep, as if her head’s not wide enough to contain all that emotion. She speaks less and less all the time, but the enigmatic smile on her lips always remains. Apparently I’m losing her to an impossible love affair with the snow. Sly bastard. Seems it’ll only be a matter of time before she fully succumbs to his charms and goes the same way as my daughter. Such is the cruel inevitability of life.

Pallid mist still wreaths the figure but I can see now that it’s Pip, one of the new workers. We still give them daft antiquated names like that, even though most of them come with authentic Japanese ones of their own: names that sound spiky and charming to our foreign ears. My wife doesn’t like them: as with most women of her generation, she harbours a blunt kind of casual racism, but gets terribly offended if anyone pulls her up about it. I try to explain the concepts of reduced labour costs and adapting to suit modern times, but it makes little difference. She still insists on dusting their cheeks with rouge to make them look more traditional, muttering “elves just aren’t what they used to be” all the while.

Pip (god knows what sort of images that one’s supposed to conjure up: boyish freckles and English pastures, I’d imagine) stops a few feet in front of me and stares. His leprechaun-green get-up looks utterly ridiculous against this sombre landscape, and he tells me in his peculiar lilting tongue that I must return home. I correct him for his use of the word “home” and shake my head.

“But Santa,” he murmurs dismally, “it’s Christmas Eve.”

“Let the parents deal with it this year,” I mutter as I turn away. “I’m not ever coming back.”

It sounds crazy but I can actually hear his tears begin to slash paths through his blusher as I walk away, such is the fabric of the air up here. I’m saving him the trauma of the flight, I tell myself. I guess I must cut quite a heroic figure to him: waddling into the bleakly beautiful Arctic sunset, as if in a warped variation of those old Westerns. In reality I’m just walking deeper into this frozen wasteland.

[Robb]

I'm not reading this until I calm down. GOOD LUCK THOUGH!

[Rowsbette]

Originally Posted by idle

GOOD LUCK THOUGH!

Er, thanks?

Still, I'm fairly sure you only posted that so you could be the first to comment.

[Rhythm Junkie]

Poor Santa

[mischief]

Excellent. Your writing keeps getting better & better (and darker) More please!

[~LEE~]

i dunno what would be worse, telling my kids that santa didnt exist or letting them read this instead!!

[cupotea]

I feel like crying now. What do you mean, he's not coming

Fantastic writing though.

[Rowsbette]

Haha, I didn't realise it was that depressing!

Thanks, mischief and cupotea... I knocked this out while delirious with late-night essay worries and I thought it ended up a little overly descriptive and Goth. Glad you liked it.

[mischief]

Originally Posted by Rowsbette

Haha, I didn't realise it was that depressing!

Thanks, mischief and cupotea... I knocked this out while delirious with late-night essay worries and I thought it ended up a little overly descriptive and Goth. Glad you liked it.

I would say it was a bit more "Goth" than your usual stuff, but in a good way. And as for it being a bit depressing, I'd take that as a huge compliment, it's not often that I read something that leaves me feeling on the down-side!

That actually doesn't sound like a compliment at all, but it is.

[Rowsbette]

Oh no, most stuff that's sposed to be depressing just makes me wanna give the author a good smack in the jaw... so I reckon what you said as a great compliment!

Thanks.

[Shannow]

Cracking stuff.
Bonus points for referencing 'the Thing' as well.

[Robb]

Loved it as usual and yes, I cracked a smile at The Thing reference.

[Rowsbette]

Thanks, boys.