Karen Russell - St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

The substitute pilot manages to hoist himself out of the crevasse and stumble over. “Boys,” he says, but he directs every word at me. He holds up a hissless walkie-talkie. “I need to slide down to where I can get reception. I’m going to call for a helicopter rescue. Don’t go anywhere until that heli comes, eh? Don’t move a muscle.”

I nod. Brauser twitches once, then stops.

The substitute pilot is already half crawling, half sliding down the empty snowfield.

“Wait up, I’ll come with you!” I start after him, unsteady in my boots, and fall sideways into the snow. “Wait for me!”

Halfway down the run, the ice pilot turns around and shouts something:

“——!”

His words break apart on the ice. Then he scoots down the gentle snowfield on his back, shooting into a sterling ice cave like a pinball.

“What? What was that? Hey, buddy, we can’t hear you….”

Brauser is slumped half dead in the snow. Rangi exhales plumes of silence. I crawl a few feet away and slam a shallow hole in the powder. I open the cramped fist of my stomach, squeeze my eyes shut, and retch.

Music is pleasant not only because of the sound of many voices, but because of the silence that is in it.

— Franz Josef

Weep! Weep! All of our transponders beep in tandem. There’s a silence of five seconds between each tiny sonic burst. I fiddle with the black knob. Together, the transponders sound like panicked crickets. How, exactly, will the rescue helicopter use these tiny chirps to find us?

“Brauser?”

Something necessary is ebbing out of Brauser’s eyes. Snow collects between his lashes. A trickle of strawberry-red blood dribbles out of the corner of his mouth.

After some experimentation, I discover that if I poke Brauser to the right of his belly button, he’ll make a sound. A gargle. Poke! A burp of despair. There’s something pitiable and terrifying about the unconscious bully. His crumpled nose and hat.

Brauser opens one blue eye and stares at me. I look away. I brush the snow off Brauser’s cold earlobes. This is the first true thing that Brauser and I have ever shared, this fear, besides dog-eared songbooks and cafeteria noodles.

“Hold on, Brauser,” I say without conviction. “Help is on the way.”

I wonder, briefly, if I could eat Brauser if it came to that. At this point, we have been alone on the glacier for fourteen minutes.

Brauser’s face is a raw, freckly pink. I fix his hat. The shadow of my hand moves back and forth over Brauser’s open eyes. Pupils expanding, pupils contracting. A dark blue ring around the world. In between breaths, I realize that something incredible is happening at this new elevation. Up here you can hear everything — the orange ping of light on metal, the purr of water melting. These blue ocean contractions in Brauser’s eyes. His pupils make a faint tidal whoosh- ing. Shadows sound like feed pouring out of a cloth sack. When I move my hand, millions of shadow grains bounce along the hard snow. That’s my sound, I think, birdseed raining out of a sack. It shakes out across the empty snowfields. I look up at the sky, nervous. What sort of bird, I wonder, is my shadow designed to be food for?

Above us, the sun bounces orange and yellow. The silence changes. We bump noses, but I can’t hear Brauser’s eyes anymore, or his shadow. I tug his hat down harder.

Rangi’s air pulses red like a swallow’s breast. Brauser’s quiet is coma white. My own silence hums with these black-and-yellow bee stripes of fear:

YOU ARE

GOING

TO DIE UP

HERE

NOBODY KNOWS

WHERE

YOU ARE

THERE IS

NO MORE DOWN

THERE

I snap out of it when I realize that Rangi has started walking away from us. He pushes through the shallow crater left by the ice plane, stabbing his crampons into the jellied snow. Then he climbs over a ridge of wind-scoured shale and disappears.

“Rangi! Wait up!”

It takes me a full five minutes to cover the short distance between us and clamber over the wedge of shale. Rangi is waiting for me on the other side. “Why did you—” The question dies on my lips. No explanation is forthcoming from Rangi. We lie flat on our bellies, taking labored breaths and watching the sky, two soldiers in the trenches. Then Rangi starts making a sound. Nothing quite so deliberate as speech, but a dense fizz of noise, like bubbles zipping up to the surface of a tall glass.

“— —…— —,” he says, pointing into the clouds.

We both look up. A helicopter is coming for us, the sun pinging off its blades.

“We’re saved!”

Rangi and I peer over the ridge and watch as the helicopter touches down on the glacier. Two men leap like flames out of the cockpit. Their vests glow red against the pure white backdrop. The glare off the snow makes their faces look like taupe holes.

The men unload three stretchers from the helicopter and lay them flat across the powder. They heave Brauser onto the first stretcher. One of the rescuers is whistling a cheery tune. It’s a scary, incongruous sound in this landscape. Each whistled syllable hacks flat into the wind like a cleaver. I can see the dark fissures between his teeth.

“Help!” I jump up and pull Rangi out of the powder, puppet-jerk him to life. “Here!” I start to wave and shout. “Here! We’re over he-e-ere!”

The ice pilot is still whistling, oblivious of us. I think I can just make out a softer, inner whistle, under the word: Run.

“Run,” Rangi says.

Then I am facedown in the snow. Rangi’s kneeling on my back, digging his whole weight into the base of my spine. Something thunks against the back of my head, and for a moment red stars cluster in front of my vision. Rangi grabs me by the legs and starts dragging me across the ice gully. I’m stunned but still conscious, too shocked to struggle. Then he yanks me over a snowbank and out of sight. The world goes blue-white-blue for a series of hills. I yelp and try to kick away, but Rangi’s got me. He presses me to his chest in a murderous bear hug as we roll. We slide down the slope together and bang our way into an ice cave. In the lunar shadows, it looks as if our cheeks are sweating blue light. The altitude here manifests itself as a pernicious thirst, and my throat burns in the desiccated air of the cave. Inside, a twinkling, chandelier light fills every ablation. Even seated, I can touch the cold ceiling. I touch my tongue to the cold roof of my mouth.

The helicopter is taking off without us. It makes three buzzard circles above us, and I’m surprised to find myself cowering with Rangi in the cave. I should be jumping up and down, screaming at its metal belly. I think about Franz Josef’s hand pressing hard on my diaphragm. Up here I can’t untangle it, the word-strangle of it, the twisted umbilical that binds deep panic to sound. I open my mouth and release dead air. Snip, snip! go the scissors of the wind.

Rangi holds his hands over his ears and buries his face in my side. He doesn’t speak again. The helicopter shrinks into a dense red pinprick of noise above us, lost in the sun. Then it’s gone. After a few moments, the silence reconstitutes itself. I can hear our shadows again, spilling up the walls. It’s a scary freedom.

When I look down and see Rangi staring up at me, I feel my stomach heave again.

“W-what-what the hell were you thinking?” My teeth are chattering uncontrollably. “Do you enjoy being stuck up here? Those men were here to rescue us, Rangi!”