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     '                                                                  '
    '   anada               "Sleeping in the Snow"               02 feb  '
   '     278                      by Infernal                     2001    '
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        The first time he fell asleep in the snow, he was barely a man,
 kicked out of the nest a little too eagerly by a steel-toed grown-up boot,
 and it wasn’t long until he found himself in over his head.  He knew he
 needed a home, but he’d never learned how to build one, or how to find
 one, or even how to seek shelter when the wind got cold enough to kill
 and the frost crackled with the whispered names of restless, greedy
 ghosts.  One hungry day in a blizzard of glass, he tripped and fell into
 a ditch, curled up into a ball, slipped his hands into his pockets, and
 dozed, not caring if he ever woke up.

        He was nearly buried before hunger and a feeble, flickering curiosity
 woke him up.  By this time, to the outside world, he was a hump in the new,
 snow-paved landscape, a steamy, frost-rimed blowhole in a smooth surface
 puffing out his exhalations like smoke signals from Hell.  Crying from the
 pain of moving frozen joints, he shifted and stood, stamping and shaking,
 and ran back to his father’s house to thaw out under broiling reproach.

        Years went by, and he learned much of the world’s ways.  Out he went
 again, assured and determined, and he sought others like him.  Together,
 he thought, they could build a home, a community that encircled itself
 for protection from a hostile environment, a collective greater than the
 sum of its misfit parts.  When the snows came, he watched in dismay as
 the bonds formed in sunnier days turned to brittle icicles and sugar
 glass, disintegrating at the first touch of the bitter, unfriendly
 wind.  He vowed to stay his ground, and he was buried, waiting for help
 to rebuild what had been destroyed.  He fell asleep there, abandoned,
 and it was only by chance that he awoke at all, freezing and nearly
 immobilized, to dig out and crawl away.

        He was hurt, but not dead, and he kept himself alive as one did in
 his world, seeking makeshift shelter when he needed it, grim and
 narrow-eyed, angry and frostbitten, certain he would never find the home
 he’d wanted for so long.  At length, he came across a fellow traveler,
 one with whom he felt a bond deeper than the blood in his veins, and
 they endeavored to carve a place together from the unforgiving rock and
 tundra.  They built the best home he had found, a shelter that warmed
 him and made him faint with gratitude at his good fortune.  And one day,
 he slept there in faith and certainty, and he awakened in the snow
 again, half-dead, alone and frozen nearly solid.

        And he finally learned the most important lesson, the one that brings
 tears to the eyes of the silent dying, and awakens the most carefree in
 the depths of night with tremors and unspoken terrors.  Sometimes
 there’s just no helping it, no way out of the snow, and you just have to
 accept it.  Eventually, the snow will kill you, but at least it will
 only feel like a deeper kind of slumber.  It’s the waking up and moving
 on that hurts so damn much.

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  '                                                                        ' 
 `   anada278   by Infernal                         (c) 2001 anada e'zine   `