How to make snow

1747

The slip of beach was cold and grey and along it a line of robed figures knelt before the aperture. Heavy rain pasted their cloaks and hoods to their bodies, and from a distance they resembled a row of strange, black amphibians.

On the cliff-face opposite, the cracked opening was surrounded by woven branches. The wind whipped a keening whine throughout the ether as a single figure stooped to crawl through the hole. The assembled witnesses lifted their palms and dropped them, as one, against the sand, beating out a soft rhythm in accompaniment.

*

2017

She opened the door and a cut of light fell across the bed.

'Are you going to go to work today?'

He turned slowly away from her. A rancid smell lingered.

'Are you going to go to work today?'

He snapped upright, bringing his palm crashing down on the bedside table. She flinched and composed herself.

'You have to call them. You have to call them if you're not.'

There was a click and a crackle. A little red circle flared in the dark. He exhaled, and amongst the scarves of smoke she could see his sunken eyes. His hair was greasy and clung to his scalp.

'You have to - '

She moved forward. The door creaked open further. In the angular spill of light she could see red on him.

'For fuck's - '

She paced to the edge of the bed, reaching. He flapped his hands, stabbing with the cigarette.

'Is that your arms? Is that your fucking arms again? What the fuck am I - you said it was a good week! It was your fucking idea to go out last night! Do you know how long I've - why the fuck don't you talk to me? Why the fuck don't you tell me when this is, when you're... why the fuck is that so hard?'

He crushed the cigarette out and flumped over, drawing the duvet up over his head. She slid down the side of the bed and pulled her knees into her chest. The sound of their breath mingled in the dark, hers quickening to a wet, guttural choking.

*

He killed his cigarette on the windscreen and lurched towards the precipice, slugging back a long, final draught. The bottle landed with a wet slap amongst the muddy grass at his feet.

The cliff dropped away beneath him as if the world one step beyond had abruptly ended; had been cut away with surgical precision to reveal the dark waters lapping deep inside. He toyed with the twig in his hands and thought that there was too much time, or that it was enough and the clouds of the everyday grind had blinded and distorted him beyond return. The rain lashed and he stepped out over the edge.

He fell, at first vertically, and then turning as time itself, the stars blurring to a tumultuous, milky backdrop.

*

The lights of the assembled emergency vehicles leaked pulsing, washy strips, illuminating the bunched figures as if they had gathered for some auteuristic midnight performance at the edges of the earth. Sparse groups of villagers watched the woman from behind the yellow tape.

'It's my husband,' she was shouting. 'He's not been well, he's not been - '

The conversations blended and turned; they bustled, phoned, sprayed search lights and exchanged places. The woman was ushered further to the perimeter of the group, a uniformed figure nodding and pushing his hands repeatedly downwards as if he would push calm back into the world.

An older villager, eyes bright and aware, separated from the onlookers to grasp the woman's arm.

'I know where he is,' he hissed.

The woman looked down at the arm he held, face contorting.

'I know where he is. There's a place. A place people go.'

Tears lined her cheeks and she pulled away from him.

'What the fuck? What the fuck are you talking about?'

Snow began falling in scattered drifts as they circled and talked. Eventually some kind of resignation or misplaced hope fell upon the woman and together they spilt from the frantic group.

He led her along the edge of the cliff to a sharp descent of beaten stone steps. They clambered down as the snow gathered and danced in quivering clouds.

At the base, water lapped around a small hole cut into the rock face. It was framed by twisted branches. Searchlights doused the ocean in creamy streaks as they huddled to talk again.

The woman stood for a long time by the opening, the man gesturing behind her. Eventually she sunk to her knees and crawled in.

*

The room stank. He lay foetal and folded in the sheets. The darkness around seemed heavy, potent and textured, as if it were fear itself leaking from his heart. She moved slowly along the wall and for all it felt like she may have been moving along the rim of the remaining world.

'Please. Please. It's been... I don't feel like I've done anything wrong. I don't know what to - '

He rolled over to look at her. His eyes were scored through with electric red lines. She could smell urine.

'I don't think drinking helps.'

He coughed and she balled her fists, as if seizing strands of the night. She moved towards him and then back, a crooked marionette.

'Please tell me why you - please tell me why you feel like this. Please. I can't - I don't know how to - I hate this. I hate it.'

Around the bed it seemed as if the night extended into endless black fields; as if the world had drained away, and there was nothing left to rise from that sodden mattress for.

*

She scrabbled through a dank tunnel. The stalactite-strewn ceiling felt close. It felt compressed and tight, as if the world had inhaled and shrunken.

There was a dim circle of cool air ahead. She crawled, slid, and writhed through it, and suddenly it was no longer rock and stone above. It was a fantastic purple sky, streaked with frozen, glacial white lines. Luminescent but motionless, as if spent with the passing of ages.

The jagged protrusions and gravelly texture underfoot gave way to sprawling, silent black fields. Rickety fencing creaked, and a single dusty path split the oceans of shadow on either side. Rose strained her eyes, and felt she could make out the specks of lonely houses dotted far away in the black grass.

A needling feeling slipped through her system. She had never known such a profound stillness. When she looked up at the purple sky again, it seemed so close as to be intent on melding with the earth. There was a soft moistness on her forehead, and she realised ashen snowflakes were dancing amongst the night.

There is no-one beside you and you have always been here. 

The people you meet and the people you thought you loved move in transient flurries around a static, decaying soul, whip-fast wraiths traversing decades.

Rose remembered those useless thoughts. Time shifting imperceptibly on its axis; all those wasted years. Beautiful surprises disintegrating like these grey flakes.

A crystalline swinging punctured the silence. It seemed to take her forever to turn round and look; ticking slowly like a clock, jittering in halted sections clockwise. A ramshackle wooden cart was crawling up the path, led by a decrepit horse.

Her mind drifted amongst the rolling black fields. The great span of her years felt odd and incoherent. 

The cart pulled up alongside her. A desperately skinny figure separated by degrees from the darkness around, dropping the reins and extending a hand. The fingers were burnt and elongated. As she clasped the hand she felt the texture of dry wood.

She sat hunched beside him as snow piled on her shoulders. His frame seemed to creak and snap as he turned to her. His face was hard, thin and warped beyond recognition, as if something had stretched it out vertically. Deep scores, like rotten bark, pockmarked the skin.

He looks like a tree, she thought, absurdly.

'Have. You. Been. Here.'

The voice was reedy, hollow and strangely displaced, as if thrown across generations. His skin and joints creaked and moaned as he spoke, and each word was punctuated by a white stain emanating from his sliver of mouth and spreading out into the ether. His thin head snapped downwards as if exhausted, clicking - in a series of rattles - back into place.

'Before.'

Snow trembled in the reflection of his black, pebble eyes.

Rose shivered. 'No.'

The pebble eyes shifted. When the words came again, they were strained and waspish. White clouds leaked from his mouth in accompaniment.

'I. Am. A. Century.'

His head slumped down again, creaking horribly. It took him a long time to raise it. Finally he tugged at the reins, and they trundled off. Rose considered his words as the snow swirled around them. She considered her own time. If she pulled it apart and broke it down it would be the same as the flakes expiring on their shoulders. Nothing was bottled and kept. Nothing was genuinely precious and sustaining anymore. It flew along, pulling her, one moment to the next.

Everything melted away. Everything good.

When she looked up at the endless black fields on either side of them, tall, indistinct shapes moved. As the cart rose up the hill, a purple streak - frosted and severe in the sky - sent a dull hue through the dark grass. She could see more lonely tree-men, lanky, skinny and lost, shuffling about in the night.

*

He was slouched forward on the mattress. A cigarette drooped from his cracked lips. A polar moon spilt a milky stain through the window and through this she moved, scratching at her arms.

'I've always - I will always...'

He looked up. The walls were there and the overflowing ashtray was there and the bottles were there and two people together and oceans apart.

'I love you,' she whispered, and her face crumpled.

He flicked the cigarette, as if she had screamed these words in every possible colour only for them to harden and crumble into black ash.

*

Snow feathered the landscape. The cart trundled down a sharp incline. At points, Rose caught glimpses of wiry limbs and gangly, stooped frames in the black haze of the fields, as if the night was peeling apart, and inside it were damned souls ingested and suspended in a beeswax of eternal darkness.

I wish I was young again, she thought. 

I was young and capable.

At a turn the cart slowed. Rose blinked and looked up. Nothing was moving. The snowflakes were frozen in place in the sky. It was deathly cold. When her voice came, finally, it felt slow and bassy.

'What's happening?'

The stickman beside her was jittering and snapping rhythmically.

'You. Can't. Be. Here. Too. Long.'

The white waft accompanying his words solidified and hung, glass-like, in the air. He began snapping and seizing again. Rose placed a hand on the tough bark of his skin. He calmed, and looking past him, she saw a little girl, crouching in the shadows by the fence at the side of the road. She wore a black plastic raincoat; her hair hung over her face, lank and wet.

'You. Have. To. Stop. Thinking.'

The stickman turned to Rose and his soft, marble eyes were drowning in a million awful memories.

'I can't,' she whispered.

The girl lifted her small head towards them. Through the web of frozen flakes Rose could see that her eyes were bleeding. Her stomach tightened. The stickman creaked violently and his skinny twig-fingers wrapped around her palm.

'Even. A. Little. Less.'

Far away in a dark, freeze-framed museum of snowflakes, Rose closed her eyes and tried to find a tiny pool of calm. She thought of the sea. The sea pushing its formlessness on into vast waves. She thought forward. She thought of his shape in the bed, and nothing about this thought made her unhappy.

She felt the snow on her face.

The stickman flung the reins and they rattled on, faster now, plunging down a slope. She looked back, and the receding roadsides were empty. There was only the relentless, churning snow and the fleeting glimpses of the stickmen in the fields beyond.

The path thinned and Rose became aware of more and more gangly figures gathering at the fences on either side, their ancient eyes following them. The cart shuddered abruptly to a halt.

In the field to their right a towering castle composed of twisting branches loomed. Silent stickmen were massed at the fence, twiggy fingers clutching it. They seemed to be watching them calmly, hopefully, marble eyes glittering in the snow.

Her companion was convulsing and snapping again. His head dropped and snapped back up. Rose felt her hands shaking.

'I wasn't helping, was I? They were... they were bad thoughts.'

The stickman shook his head, setting off a rattling spasm. Rose huddled close and held his arm.

'Unhappy thoughts.'

The thin face drooped lower. Flakes sparkled on their clothing.

'What are you?'

The stickman wheezed a vapourish white haze.

'Collectors.'

He sounded exhausted. Rose leaned over to support him as he slumped forward.

'Unhappy thoughts,' she breathed.

'They. Come. Down. Here.'

Heaving and huffing in white flushes, the stickman swung down from the cart. On the carpet of snow he looked terribly wizened and frail. Rose clambered down. Together they eased over the fence and crunched through the choppy powder towards the castle.

'Why?' She whispered, after several paces.

'It's. Of. Value.' He said, as his colleagues mingled around them, pressing in, a curious forest.

He left a row of cupped indentations in the snow as he strode through the arched doorway of the castle. Rose followed. Jagged, interlocked boughs merged around the entrance, rising high over her head as she crossed the threshold into a staggering puzzlebox ceiling of intricately thatched branches. The stickmen behind them clustered outside, peering, rustling and groaning.

He was there. He was asleep on a small, boxed nest of twigs. She felt a surge in her heart. A deep stab for all the times she had failed to understand or failed to act or failed to love or failed to learn anything about why two people would be together as years passed and the world changed.

A little steel helmet, a blockish half-circle, was attached to his head. A fantastic array of twisting, gleaming tubes emanated from its crown, spiralling, fanning out and growing in size as they stretched towards the ceiling to puncture the roof.

The stickman looked at her with his sad, moist, black eyes. He exhaled softly. A plume of white vapour sifted from his cracked lips. He raised a single crooked finger.

Rose followed the path of the white cloud. She felt suddenly, utterly bereft.

It rose towards the tubes, scaling up towards the ceiling. At a certain height it separated, dissolved, and a brief flurry of snow whirled and sank slowly to the floor, melting around them.

The stickman ambled over to her husband, motionless in his nest. Placing skinny hands on his shoulders, he began to gently shake him. Rose looked on, confused. 

The tubes streaking from the steel helmet began to glow. Gassy white clouds leaked from under the rim of the helmet. An industrial rumble filled the air and the tubes swelled and contracted, heaving and belching. Still the stickman softly buffeted her husband. She swore she could see a vague smile playing in his lips as he slept.

In a gap in the massed branches high, high above them, enormous clouds of white smoke exploded from the tubes, billowing out into the purple sky.

One of the stickmen lingering by the door rushed over to guide her outside, creaking and swishing excitedly. The stretch of sky above was obscured by a thick blanket; millions of eddying snowflakes. Too many for the soul to comprehend. Yet there they stood, watching them fall and melt away into nothing.

The crowd of gangly figures followed her in a patient queue as she returned to the castle. At the side of the nest, her stickman companion was slumped on the floor. His features and frame weathered and ravaged, driven and hopeful under the weight of infinite sadnesses.

Her husband slept on in his nest, a soft smile creasing his face.

The stickman crawled forward and dragged himself up. His eyes swam; bottomless, coal-black cups.

'Feels. Good. To. Shake. It. Out.'

Rose's lips trembled. She knelt down to hold her husband. When she released him they were back in the darkness of their room, the stale smell of urine and cigarettes hanging in the air.

*

He peeled the covers off slowly. He tripped through to the bathroom, the light stinging his eyes. He showered and he was thinking. He shaved and he was thinking. He struggled with the knot of his tie and he was thinking and he was thinking and he was thinking -

'John.'

She had stopped in the corridor, her eyes wide, as he eased down the stairs. He picked up his briefcase by the door and snapped it open, checking his files. He stood and checked his reflection a final time, breathing deeply. He turned to the door, turned back, paced over and hugged her tight.

She kissed him and held his head.

He stepped out the door and for the briefest of moments it all felt like the most wonderful journey and 

That

Was

Enough

*

Picture: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=64247&picture=s... / CCO Public Domain