Eric Dimbleby: White Out

“My silly Picasso,” he said to himself, weakly. His vision had been starry all morning, since their earlier meal (which he refused to call “breakfast”, for fear of ruining his favorite word forever). He was starting to ration their food supplies more carefully, being quite mindful of an uncertain future, so he’d held back on his own consumption for the kid’s sake. No one could say how long it would be until the snow melted enough at least to let him get out of the house, even if it was to hunt down the neighbor’s dog and kill it.

The neighbor’s dog had become sort of an internal joke that he kept repeating to himself, but it seemed more and more plausible every time he thought it. The neighbor’s dog was named Bucky, and he was one of many options. If the neighbors didn’t chow down on Bucky first, of course. Sometimes, Christian would think about Bucky, picturing him running around the yard, fetching a bone. And in the next thought, he would picture Bucky on a wooden spit, charring over a fire. His daydreams about eating Bucky were getting more fanatical with his growing hunger. It wasn’t that they were starving. He had plenty of canned goods, enough to last them a very long time. They never kept much meat in the house, so they had burned through some bacon and frozen hamburgers during the first few days.

Christian tried to laugh at his own silliness, but found he didn’t have it in him. Soon enough, he and Paulie would go back to bed again, to cuddle under the covers and conserve their body heat until dinnertime, if they bothered with dinner at all. They would eat lunch first, though. He’d mash up some canned carrots and corn. Paulie didn’t like canned carrots (raw were fine, as long as he had some onion dip), but he was starting to understand that he didn’t really have a choice in the matter anymore.

Paulie got it , even without Christian explaining it at all.

The kid understood the dire situation they were in, though he couldn’t formulate it into his own words, not as an adult could. He could see the heavy look in Christian’s eyes when his father fretted over their situation. The child knew little of pain and suffering in his limited life span, but he detected, at least on a subconscious level that it existed, and that it was closer to their doorstep than his father would have liked, and it would return again and again if things didn’t shape up soon.

He could hear Paulie, talking to himself and clattering plastic bits together in frolic. The sound overjoyed Christian. At least we’re still acting human.

Upstairs in the bedroom, Paulie was playing with his train set. Christian noticed that when his son played, he was staying closer and closer to the warm bed, knowing that it was a good place to be and a good place to survive. Yesterday afternoon, Christian had even found him in the bed, playing with pieces of his train beneath the covers, even though the kid couldn’t see what he was doing. Some survival mechanism in Paulie’s head was telling him that he needed to conserve his body heat, so venturing about the house the way he once did was avoided.

“Hey, Paulie?” Christian called out. His voice sounded terrible, as if he’d been swallowing nails and tacks. Sort of like Tom Waits, but without the smoky-room vibes.

“Yeah, Daddah?” his son replied, his feet clomping towards the top of the stairs. Christian couldn’t see him, but he could hear that he was getting closer. “Lunch time?” Paulie asked, already knowing the new routine that they had fallen into since his mother’s absence.

“You got it, kiddo.”

Christian stood up, feeling the cold ache in the small of his back. He’d pulled a muscle trying to shovel the driveway on day two of the storm. He almost laughed thinking about that now, how fruitless that activity ended up being in the long run. Nobody could have kept up with the total accumulation, even with a snow blower running twenty-four hours a day. It came down too fast, and it was still coming down faster still, inches and inches with every hour, around the clock, unrelenting.

He popped open a can of carrots and poured some apple juice into a cup. He kept the bottles of juice wrapped in thick blankets, so that they would not freeze. They had a huge supply in the basement, but even that was starting to dwindle. He’d have to start melting and sterilizing snow, soon enough.

Nothing from Paulie. No excited footsteps. Although, how often did one get excited over canned carrots and corn? Very rarely, especially in the four year old demographic.

“You coming?” he called up the stairs again, once he had their lunches ready. He walked to the bottom of the stairs, looking up at his boy.

Paulie looked as if he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to see—troubled by something that he couldn’t quite put into words, not with his limited vocabulary. Christian sensed some strange hesitance in his son, something he had never displayed before. Suddenly, his stomach soured. What the hell had the kid seen?

“What is it, Paulie? Are you okay?”

“Guy look sick.”

“What guy?”

“Guy outside. He look sick, so, so sick,” Paulie said. He was always worried whenever Mommy or Daddy caught a cold, perpetually asking them if they were sick or not. He still equated sickness with death. Sick animals died, and so did sick people, the boy presumed.

Christian could hardly perceive the floating, tingling feeling in his stomach as he ran up the stairs, as if in a dream, into the bedroom. He stared at his second floor window, where a man with jet-black hair had crammed his face against the icy window. He couldn’t make out his identity and didn’t recognize the man at all.

He looked as if he’d been dead awhile.

Why hadn’t they heard him? Had he banged on the window? Had he cried out for somebody to let him in? Perhaps he hadn’t the strength to do that, perishing only inches away from salvation. Christian rewound his memory through the day, wondering if he’d heard a strange noise that he’d given no credence to. Nothing came to mind. They would have heard something for sure, especially with no electricity creating noise through the house. The only sounds that filled their house were he and Paulie’s voices.

“Daddah?” Paulie asked vaguely, grabbing tight to his father’s hand. They stood in silence for several minutes, staring at the rigid shape of the dead man against the window, obscured by the frost both inside and outside the window pane. Christian had no idea what to say, and even less what to do.

Christian felt his whole body surge as the man’s left eye opened with a pop, vacant and lifeless and peering into their home from the white abyss.

They settled on embarking from the third floor window, like two burglars escaping after a big heist. Two days earlier, when Tony first spoke of leaving, they would have left from the second floor window, but that option was no longer viable. A raging easterly wind had pushed all the snow up against the building, creating a snowy slide that dipped deep down into the parking lot where the cars were wholly covered. It tapered off after the lot, and that was where Tony would put his muscle into propelling them, if they didn’t sink to their deaths immediately. Annie wasn’t sure which way it would go, even still.

Tony insisted upon starting off with a bang, propelling himself and Annie (not to mention their homemade sled-slash-raft) off the edge of the wide steel sill of the pried open window. Instantaneously, they gathered momentum, though he gave an extra push as they transferred into the chowdery white abyss.

Annie gasped as they hit the outside air, not from the shock of their descent from the snowy incline, but from the icy chill of forty below zero temperatures, as indicated in their final temperature reading before their exit. The wind had let up some earlier in the morning, but it returned gust by gust, minute by minute.