Eric Dimbleby: White Out

If only he knew the half of it , Annie thought to herself, fighting those perpetual guilt pangs that seemed to amplify with every miserable fucking day that passed. If he only knew about the cuddling the night before .

And the fucking. That’s the real reason you won’t scorn your husband’s name, isn’t it? Isn’t it all about the guilt? All about the fucking and sucking and all those other things that you can’t even admit to yourself?

Annie clasped her hands to her mouth, hoping to pin something in place that she wasn’t quite sure was there.

“So I assume Tony has a brilliant fucking plan?” Christian asked, dubiously. His voice was on the verge of crumbling into tiny shards of pain. She felt sorry for him, even though she continued with her nasty demeanor.

She didn’t know his plan at all, but it sounded pretty believable to say it, if only to convince her husband that it was all well in hand. “He does. I think it’ll work. The snow won’t get us, but the cold will. We have a plan for both.” Annie bit her lip so hard that she felt it might burst if she went any harder.

Christian held his silence. She realized that he didn’t even want to hear the plan. “Here,” he said next, tossing the phone about in his hands, “let me put Paulie on for you.”

Paulie’s squeaky voice came to life on the phone, declaring his longing for his mother (in not so many words), and Annie could not help the tears that flowed from her eyes. As the tears started to freeze in place, crystallizing at the curves of her cheeks, she wished that she could listen to his sweet little voice forever, and that she would never have to go out into the Hell that had sprung up all around her.

The sun shone high in the sky, bombarding the planet with shimmering rays. It wouldn’t last, and Winnie understood that by this point, it was a tease. The sun had come out a day earlier as well, only to scamper back behind the clouds.

It wasn’t snowing at the moment, but the wind continued to whip hard against Winnie’s face. Daggers of pain shot through her cheeks and forehead.

This is the end, isn’t it? Look at all that white, as far as you can see. This might be the last thing you ever see. Don’t you wish you had stayed behind with Tony and Annie?

“I need to feed my cats,” she whispered, though she couldn’t be sure if she said it out loud or simply to herself.

Your cats are dead. It’s been four weeks. Unless they figured out how to use a can opener, all four of them are lined up at the window, frozen on the back of your easy chair, waiting for their mother to come home. You should have stayed behind. They could have saved you, Winnie.

Winnie couldn’t feel anything below her waist.

A phantom numbness exponentially spread through her limbs, buried beneath the snow. With every labored step she took, she sank deeper and deeper, until her entire lower half was compacted in the snow, as if she’d been dropped from an airplane. It was almost an icy quick sand. She didn’t stand a chance of digging herself out, not unless the sun stayed out for several hours.

And just like that, the sun disappeared. A snowflake landed on Winnie’s nose and she clenched her eyes shut, praying for the sun to return. “My blessed Jesus Christ, I’ve always loved you and you’ve always loved me. Please turn on the sun again, make it shine. Make this all melt so I can get home and be warm with my kitties. Please protect them until I can make it there. Oh, Jesus, I beg of you.”

The sky turned dark and the vicious little voice inside of her head started to laugh at this desperation in faith.

Fool.

Now it was time to panic. “Tony! Annie! Help me!” She called out into the gray sky, trying to crane her neck back towards the south where her co-workers might hear her and come to her rescue.

Scream, piggy, scream. Don’t you wish you hadn’t shoved all those double cheeseburgers in your mouth? Don’t you wish you’d eaten a damn salad just once in your life? Now you’re sinking deeper into this God forsaken snow, one inch at a time, drowning in your bad decisions. Dive, piggy, dive! See if you can find the bottom. Maybe there’re some chicken wings down there. You’re sinking like a rock, but you always have been, haven’t you?

“Help me,” she repeated, this time in a scratchy, strangulated voice that she barely recognized as her own. Her energy was dwindling with every pained, frozen breath. She looked down at her chest, realizing that she could no longer feel her pendulous breasts. They’d probably frozen. Maybe they had shattered altogether. Her only real physical asset, and she was certain that her nipples had fallen off from frostbite.

Inhaling deep into her chest, Winnie stared out at the blinding white, grappling for a bit of serenity. She couldn’t move her legs or her hips. If somebody didn’t come along soon (whoever the hell that might be), then this was where her body might remain for all eternity, unless Jesus himself came and dug her up. But Jesus probably had a lot of other dead people to exhume first.

When and if the snow melted, it would expose her corpse to the survivors of this madness.

Stop it. It’s not going to end. Tony’s an idiot, but he was right. This is the beginning of the end—the next Ice Age. It has begun, this apocalypse. Aren’t you sad you’re going to miss all the fireworks? Didn’t you always secretly dream about this day? All those lonely nights, and those never-ending weekends where nobody would know if you were dead or alive, except your mangy kittens? You craved this day, and here it is. Sitting in a big pile of snow, looking like a dolt to God above, and wishing you had a cheeseburger more than a helicopter to pull you out of this quicksand.

Winnie always assumed, even from a young age that her obesity would claim her by the age of forty. The idea that she’d made it all the way to fifty-five years old was a miracle in and of itself. The years had been unreasonably cruel to her, but not as cruel as she’d been to herself. Her mother warned her of the path she was taking, and here it was in full fruition. Death by sinking.

A drift of white blasted across the surface of her snowy grave, catching her on the chin, stinging like a bee. She could feel her bottom lip starting to crystallize and snap. The snow wasn’t even the worst part. The bitter cold was deadly. Before she’d left, stealing away in the middle of the night like a teenage runaway, the thermometer outside her office window had registered at twenty-six degrees below zero. Not exactly an uncommon temperature for New England, but not in March.

It’s going to stop soon , she coached herself, fighting back against the nastier half of her unraveling brain. And when it stops, they’ll come find me. And this will end. And I’ll get warm. And they’ll bring me home. We’ll eat soup and watch old black and white movies while we recover.

The other half giggled.

Soup? You thick-headed piggy. You’ll be dead in an hour. Deader than disco, bitch.

Winnie clenched her eyelids shut; exhaling, though it pained her to do so. She approached a false serenity, hoping it would release her from this hell. She tried to open her eyes again, to stare at that pristine snow and ponder God, the universe, and everything in between.

But now she couldn’t open her eyes. They’d frozen shut. She tried to lift her arms, to pry them open, but found that they too were unresponsive.

“Peepers, Jingles, Bobo, Margie,” she mumbled her cats’ names off one by one, starting to drift into some childish fantasy of walking through her grandfather’s garden, where the zucchini was always a foot long and the basil was aromatic, drifting through the late spring breeze. These warm images darted through her head, just like when she went to sleep at night. Her grandfather spoke in soft whispers. He always knew the right things to say, to make her feel not so scared, to make her feel not so unworthy of kindness.