Stormborn

By khaleesian

Time was, he would have appreciated this sort of landscape.  A mountain pass, the sweep of its beauty obscured by the cloud that was currently spitting out insouciant snow.  The clouds brushed the very top of the trees and narrowed his sight to perhaps three meters in front of his nose. His slowly numbing nose.  Why had he pulled off his mask?  Ah yes, so he could ascertain if peripheral vision would make a difference. And, of course, it did not. Already his skin felt like parchment, particularly his lips.

Clumsily, he bit at the tips of his gloves to hold them steady while he attempted to curl his fingers into a fist.  They had stiffened to claws in the last hour of steering the sled and it took considerable will to curl them over his thumbs.  The temperature was dropping rapidly. The snow swirled in the faint glow, wafting every which way on the updraft. Every moment he felt the sting of another snowflake striking his face, yet he left his mask tucked into his parka.

The snow had frosted the pines until they looked like some undersea coral that he’d seen in a book once.  The bare birches looked like nothing so much as a many-fingered hand, deathly white.  He wondered how long he would have to stay before the snow was robbing him of his contours, smoothing his edges.  The wind whipping away the corners of his jaw, chin, nose. The air did not yet hurt to breathe and if he put his mask back on he would be perfectly comfortable.  Still he hesitated. 

In the near distance before him there was a lake and a village. He knew this with a certainty.  His early life had been a constant race to fill his head with certainty.  Knowledge seemed the only barrier against boredom, against insignificance in the face of nature. His knowledge had seen him through, it had stood between him and death many times. Gratified each time he discovered that one more thing printed in a book was true and not merely sanctified by print.  Gratified when the connections that his mind made between facts and events proved useful. His knowledge had been a reliable ally until … well until recently.

Chicago. He grinned ruefully to himself. Chicago had been an unexpected gift after all. The sheer variety of scent was staggering. He inhaled deeply, quickly feeling the burn in the edges of his chest.  All this air, scented with nothing but snow. He was startled to feel a pang of nostalgia for the gritty acrid scent of the paved streets. Everything was so sharp there, in contrast to this dreamlike landscape. The billowing fog made the mountain feel evanescent like it would wisp away when the storm cleared.  Chicago was full of hard edges, hard eyes, it was easy to know where he ended and everything else began. He was surprised to discover that he missed it.

Surprise.  That was another element casually re-introduced to his well-ordered existence. 

Chicago had become another source of knowledge in a way. He’d learned that sophistication and worldliness are not things you can learn from books. Even if he knew everything in the world, he knew he would never be able to ape the flat, disbelieving look that his former partner had worn with such ease. The memory of that sly, cynical look was fading and he was left only with the images on photographs and that final postcard. His former partner had finally come to smile unreservedly. He smiled now considering that if Chicago had taught him much, he had at least imparted one lesson to one of its natives.  Of course, his current partner hardly needed that lesson.  The white of Kowalski’s smile on the first day they met, rivaled the snow surrounding him.

Chicago had effortlessly exposed the gaps between what he knew and what he simply imagined to be true.  How often now he found himself hovering in the half-life between certainty and intuition.

One of the dogs whined, the sound whipped away, but cutting into a mysterious register so that he felt it rather than heard it. He really should get a move on.  Allowances could be made for a storm but his own whimsical mental meandering….He was on holiday.  Allowances would simply have to be made. Besides which, no one in the village was really expecting him. His arrival would be unexpected.

For one moment, the sky lightened. The layers of shifting cloud aligned themselves allowing the sun to pierce through for one blinding instant.  The unfettered rays limned the valley below with a sudden golden halo. The stark edges of his path stood out abruptly in sharp relief before the cloud re-formed swirling around the trees.  Fraser drove on, in silence but for the yipping of his dogs, pondering other unexpected arrivals.



End, for now