Snow & Ice
A story about being stuck inside.
It was only when I saw we were going to run out of sandwich bread that I started to get worried. Before that it hadn’t been exactly pleasant, of course, the blackouts, the water main breaking, the way the cold slipped in under the doors and around the windows, but it was nothing we hadn’t anticipated, nothing we hadn’t planned for. We’re careful people, and we’d been hearing how things could get around here ever since we announced the move. Our friends all thought we were crazy. Couldn’t understand it at all. But we knew it was what we wanted to do.
The bread, though. When I went to make a sandwich and saw that only the two end pieces were left, I couldn’t ignore it any longer: things were getting serious. The sandwich bread is not something that’s ever supposed to run out. It’s a backup foodstuff, something for when we don’t have the time or the energy to make anything else. They pump the loaves so full of preservatives these days they’ll last for weeks, and that’s really as long as it should take us to eat them. We’ve always got another one stashed away in the freezer, just as a matter of principle. But we’d thawed that one out days ago – and now it was used up, too. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
It wasn’t even much of a sandwich, the one I ate with those last couple slices, just peanut butter and jam from a half-empty jar we’d found at the back of the fridge – L. didn’t trust it, but I thought it smelled good enough. I would have preferred something a bit more mature, of course, but all the fresh veggies and lunch meats were long gone by that point. It felt almost luxurious just having two different spreads.
I went over to L. by the window. I had to admit, there was the one decent thing about the storm: most of the time, the wind blew all in the same direction, from behind the house, leaving the front mostly unobstructed by piled-up snow. It made the view strange though, full of smooth slopes rising away from us. She had been spending a lot of time standing there lately, looking out at the street. The blizzard had been going on for so long now; I didn’t know what she expected to see. One of the trees on the road had fallen down yesterday, right onto our neighbor’s car parked in his driveway, and no one had come to take it away.
“We’re out of sandwich bread,” I said to her.
“Shit.”
“We’ll have to go out there, you know. Sooner or later.”
“No, it’s not safe. We just have to wait a little longer. I’m sure the storm will tire itself soon. These things always do. We just have to wait it out.”
“Well –”
“It will. It has to.”
“Okay, but we’re running out of food.”
She didn’t have anything to say after that, and I didn’t either. I stood and looked out the window with her for a while, then went down to my workshop, where I’ve been spending more and more of my time. I’ve been trying to teach myself woodcutting. I’m not much of an artist, but it keeps my hands busy. Into one block, I’ve carved the profile a stray cat with its back arched, and into another, a looming crescent moon.
Things went on like that. Every day, our supplies ran lower. I would find myself opening the cupboards and the drawers and finding things missing that I hadn’t imagined could be gone, bags and boxes and cartons whose emptiness didn’t seem possible. We ran out of Cheerios. We ran out of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. We debated unplugging the fridge, then remembered that with the way the power kept cutting out, it was probably a moot point by now, anyway. I opened the freezer and found things growing inside, slime molds, little forests of ghostly mushrooms, so pale they were almost translucent. The ice had all melted out of the trays and reformed into a cool, crystal clear lake that sloshed up against me and spilled onto the floor. I leapt back in surprise, involuntarily. I felt a breeze in my hair and L. laughed at me. Sometimes, in search of supplies, I would find myself crammed in some part of the pantry I had never been to before, a place that had been buried behind old boxes of oatmeal or big burlap bags of white rice, some nook or cranny I had never had any reason to be until now, entirely lost, with no recollection of how I got there. The bare, dusty bulb would grow distant above me, and the shelves all around would go dim. I would feel as though pudgy red hands were reaching out through the walls, grabbing what little was left on them. They would snatch this roll of mints or that sachet of mustard and take it away into some inaccessible interior space inside the walls of our house, where the hands all climbed around on top of each other dividing the spoils like a greedy orgy of spiders. I would imagine this and want to get out, go somewhere else, but in the meantime the pantry would have become like an endlessly twisting maze, reshaping itself whenever I moved so the exit never seemed to come any closer. I would be lost for hours stuck in dead ends that turned into spirals leading infinitely upwards and downwards, leading into stacked iterations of the same place, the same pantry, the same house, the same maze, all identical except that each contained a copy of me getting lost in his own unique and particular way, not quite like any of the others, but all of us of the same family body, links on the same cosmic chain, which I could almost see sometimes, glittering wildly, dripping with the effluvia of stars, extending out from both of my palms in a direction which was like all directions at the same time, and like no direction at all. And I would know that I was imagining all this, that really I was just sitting on the floor of the pantry, having an episode of vertigo, which is something I used to struggle with when I was younger, before I grew up and met L. and got my degree in Humanism, especially when I hadn’t eaten my breakfast, which I wasn’t doing much these days, of course, and that soon I would come to my senses. Surely, I would suddenly understand exactly where I was, and where the door was, and I would have no trouble getting up and going to it and exiting through it, and not coming back until the hands were gone, retreated back into their secretive pockets and hideous burrows. No, I would tell myself, very soon I’m going to go find L. and tell her very seriously that this has gotten completely out of control, that we can’t wait longer, we have to go out there and get some damn groceries even if it’s still snowing and the roads haven’t quite all been cleared. Then, I knew, she will tell me it’s not safe, and that we still have to wait just a little bit longer.
I woke up in the workshop. I didn’t remember falling asleep, but there I was on the floor with an old tarp pulled over me. I felt disoriented. I got up and brushed myself off and went upstairs. L. was standing by the window.
“Good morning,” I said.
“It’s not morning.”
“What?”
“It’s the middle of the night. Look.”
I looked. It was pitch black outside.
“Oh.”
“Why did you think it was morning?”
“I fell asleep.”
“You fell asleep?”
“Yeah. Down in the workshop. I thought you knew.”
“How would I know?”
“When I woke up, that old tarp was covering me like a blanket. That wasn’t you?”
“No, you must have done that yourself. I haven’t been down there.”
“You’ve just been standing here this whole time?”
“It hasn’t been that long.”
“I think it’s been longer than you think.”
“You have no idea how long it’s been. You were asleep.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I saw something, you know. Out there.” She wasn’t looking at me. The entire time we had been talking, her eyes had stayed fixed straight ahead.
“What do you mean, ‘saw something?’”
“I mean I saw something. Some sort of animal, or something. It was skulking around over in Hector’s yard.” Hector was our neighbor. He was the one whose car it was that the tree had fallen on. “It looked like it was trying to get into his car.”
“What sort of animal was it? It wasn’t a bear, right?”
“I don’t know. It was wearing a mask.”
“Animals don’t wear masks.”
“Well, this one was.”
“I don’t see anything now.”
“I’m sure it’s still hanging around. Just wait. You’ll see.”
I waited. We both waited. And while we waited, the place we had hoped to make a life in was buried in snow, and everything we had known began to crumble away. We found clusters hard little seeds hidden inside the walls, spilling out as they turned into dust. We were so hungry by then, we didn’t think twice about eating them. They tasted bitter but nourishing, substantial in a way I had almost forgotten something could be. After a while, full of new energy, I went down to my workshop, and then into a crawlspace that I suddenly knew someone had dug underneath, years before we were here. I crawled for a long time, until I came to a gate I couldn’t pass through. The bars were heavy and iron, and the lock on the door demanded a thumbprint I didn’t have. I thought I heard L. behind me, but when I turned around, no one was there. Eventually, the bitterness rose back up in me, and slowly, slowly, I fell silent, asleep. The wind continued to blow, all in one direction.