Let's Call Him Ice

Part 1

The blizzard hit. I looked up, and immediately regretted it. I could practically feel my neck freezing over. I knew that I was probably going to die, because I hadn’t made dug myself into safety before now, but at the moment, I was too tired to care. It was then that I saw a man. He was sitting with his legs crossed and his head erect, as if daring the world to come and get him. His face was turned upwards towards the sky. I shivered, both because of the blizzard raging all around me, and because I knew that he must be dead. I crawled up to the body and with most of whatever strength I had left, I began to dig. I don’t know why I chose this place with the horrid frozen body to dig my shelter. I knew that I should have started this three minutes ago in the spot where I was when the blizzard hit me so suddenly. But I think I did it because I didn’t want to lose the body, and I knew that if I dug anywhere else, I would do just that.

            I dug with my mini-shovel. The snow felt nearly as hard as ice, and hacking away at it was tiresome. Finally, almost ten minutes of freezing later, I had a hole big enough to crawl into if I curled up tight, which I would be doing to conserve heat. I pulled my pack on top of the hole afterwards, to bury me in tight. To my delight, my radio (which I had thought dead) crackled to life. Amy’s voice sounded out, responding to my earlier urgent pleas for help.

            “Are you (crackle) dearie? I can’t (crackle) fix on your cords. Can you hear me? (crackle)-ee?”

I responded almost instantly with the press of a button, “Amy?” I shouted into the two way radio, trying to out-do the sound of the wind, “Amy! I’m here! Do you read me?”

“I (crackle) you. The signal is (crackle) now. (crackle) your cords! What are (crackle)-anates?”

“You say you need my cords?” I shouted back into the two-way radio. After receiving confirmation, I shouted my coordinates through to her as loudly as I could. The radio crackled off and I could no longer hear Amy’s voice. I hoped that help was coming my way. Oh how dearly I hoped.

            I went to sleep. I was exhausted. I tried to stay awake, I knew that sleep could mean my body temperature dropping, which could very well mean death, but I had just dug a hole in the ice in the middle of a blizzard. I was tired, and sleep felt warm. I was too tired to even feel my spidy-senses tingling and alarm bells going off in my head with choruses of angles shouting at me in harmonies that ‘Sleep means death! You can’t sleep now!’ while the alarm bells in my head kept ringing and my spidy-senses kept tingling. Or at least that’s how I remembered it later. In retrospect, I probably just had a very well-reasoned argument with myself that confounded myself so thoroughly and was to astounding in why I shouldn’t go to sleep, that I just gave up and slept. I don’t know what I was thinking, I was freezing to death, ok?

            Hands gripped me and pulled me from the snow covered hill. I looked up through the ice incrusting my eyelids, and saw the body of the dead man. Only he wasn’t dead… at least he didn’t look too dead. He was moving and breathing and that’s not something dead people usually do, right? There was no way he could have survived that blizzard, especially since when it started, his lips ere already blue. Almost mere seconds from when he pulled me out of my hole, it collapsed. ‘Huh’ I thought, ‘a dead man just saved my life.’ The thought sounded slightly ironic, but with my frozen mind, I couldn’t figure out why.

            I looked at him. He looked at me. Oddly I didn’t find fear in my examination of him. And he looked equally unafraid of me. He spoke, and it took me a few seconds to realize that is was in a language I’d never heard of before. I sighed.

            “Do you speak English?” I asked him, guessing the answer. He didn’t respond. Just to be sure, I repeated the question, but he was adamant in his silence. I sighed again, and slumped against the pile of snow, curling into a ball to conserve heat. The storm was over, and now that there was no roaring wind, there was no sound at all besides my own heart-beat. I considered digging another hold in the snow to bury myself in. To be protected from the wind, but as I knew there was no wind, I didn’t really see the point of putting snow on all sides of my body, instead of just two.

Because I knew he probably couldn’t speak English, I found myself talking to the man the way one talks to an infant who only needs to hear the sound of your voice and does not really care what you are saying. I told him about how I was miserable at home, because of the Miami heat. And about how I hated it when people touched me, even if I appreciated the emotional value behind the gesture. I think people should place more value in some other form of intimacy other than contact. I told him about how I loved the perfect still clear beauty of a bright Alaskan tundra, and the peace it brought me. I talked about how I would have to go home if I got lost again, and I had. Sadness filled my voice, and he could hear it.

He crawled over to me on his hands and knees. I marveled at how he was able to touch the snow with his bare skin without injury or pain. He kneeled in front of me and leaned forwards, scrutinizing my own eyes with his jagged greyish blue ones. Then something about his expression changed. His eyes focused, as if concentrating on something, and his face twitched. The fear that I failed to feel before now came roaring through my body, and adrenaline began to course through my veins. I scrambled backwards, terrified of him, but not knowing why.

He put a hand up, ordering me to order me to stay still, and I did. I don’t know why I did, but somehow I knew that I had to. I also knew to be very very afraid. I shook as furiously as a cornered bunny, and my eyes widened until they bugged out, and yet I could not find it in myself to break free of the invisible hold. Maybe I was pinned down in fear, I had heard of that happening, but no, no matter how hard I tried, I could not will myself to move.

         The man stood up and towered over my trembling body. He walked over to me and knelt down by my right side on one knee. He placed his impossibly cold first two fingers on my forehead. I gasped, his fingers were not just cold but icy. I started at him in terror, and he smiled as if trying to reassure me. He removed his fingers, and instead placed them to hover above my lips. He touched my lips with his freezing fingers as briefly as possible, and then I could move again. The second I had freedom of movement, I took off running away from him as quickly as I could in the snow. He watched me with curious eyes, and I realized that I wasn’t going anywhere. I returned the gaze, eyeing him as he placed his fingers to his own lips and then forehead.