Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

Soon she would wind her way down the ice stream and through the coastal pass. She would cross from the land mass onto the Ross Ice Shelf. And not long after that – a matter of days, probably – she would make it to the station. What a relief it would be to have other human beings to talk to again.

But on her third day of sledging, the temperature dropped and the sky clouded over, and the wind began whipping up pennants of ice and snow. Before she knew it, she was in the middle of a blizzard. She could still move forward, but the wind was coming from the northwest now, directly in front of her, which made the traveling slow and difficult. Pellets of hardened snow tapped against the window of the sledge, so much of it that it sounded like leaves crackling in a fire. Her headlights bored a narrow tunnel through the blizzard, but the snow confused her vision, making everything go white. She kept altering her focus as she tried to see more deeply into the storm, and the snow would catch her gaze and carry it back to the windshield in a series of shifting planes. Before so much as an hour had passed, her eyes had begun to ache and burn, though she knew she couldn't look away. The spindrift was thick, hiding the telltale cross ridges and depressions that marked the openings of the crevasses. She had to watch the ground carefully to avoid them.

The runners of the sledge were outfitted with circular frames of flat metal paddles – she thought of them as flippers – that slapped out in front of the sledge as it moved forward and then drew back underneath as it traveled on. They were a safety device, a sort of makeshift cantilever designed to carry her over any fissures she happened to encounter – or at least any fissures no more than six feet wide. Several times, she had felt the sledge plummeting forward suddenly and then lifting and righting itself before it moved on and she knew she had crossed over another crevasse. She felt as though she were driving a car down a crumbling road. The supporting ice of the glaciers had been decaying for decades, and rifts as deep as subway trenches could open in a matter of hours, sealing themselves off just as quickly. If she slipped, she wouldn't be discovered until the ice finished melting sometime in the middle of the next century. But she had been trained by years of city driving to recognize every bump and jar she felt as just another flaw in the road. If she was leaning forward in her seat and a particular sort of lurch went through her body, she naturally assumed that she had hit a pothole. It was a form of muscle memory.

Muscle memory. Mussel memory. Alive, alive-O!

The storm continued for the next few days. She had to trust to her compass and the few flickering signals that registered on her GPS monitor to maintain her bearing. She knew when she had reached the ice stream that connected the land mass to the bay by the number of knolls and ridges that appeared in her path, and also by the generally brashy quality of the ice, but she had no idea how long it would take her to make it through the pass onto level ground.

The snow fell heavy and fast. Sometimes she didn't see the obstacles that lay ahead of her until they were only a few feet away. She had to drive very slowly to avoid them. She was lucky to cover a mile or two in an hour, ten or fifteen in a day. The runners of the sledge dipped, lifted, and dipped again as she made her way through the drifts, and the snowflakes clustered together like stars on her windshield. By the end of the day, when she lay down in her sleeping bag and closed her eyes, her body would seem to rock back and forth inside itself, and she would see streamers of white light slanting across her vision. Even in her dreams, she felt herself sledging across the ice and the darkness.

She was working harder than she ever had in her life, and she was exhausted. She had chopped wood before. She had mixed concrete. She had even helped the Coca-Cola Homes for Neighbors Club build a row of apartments on the side of a hill, clearing the stumps and brush, laying the foundations and everything. But this was nothing compared to the effort of keeping a two-ton sledge on course through the center of a snowstorm. Whenever she stopped to rest, for even a few minutes, a stabbing pain would tear through the muscles in her calves and forearms, and she would have to remind herself to breathe. It was not so much the amount of exercise she was subjecting herself to, but the way she was holding her body at tension for so long. It took an hour or more of total stillness before her muscles would begin to go slack, followed by a comforting numbness that made her want to drift off to sleep.

She was too tired to cook at night, and she was tempted to leave the metal pots and the Primus stove in the back of the sledge, but she carried them into the tent with her so that she would be able to heat her coffee in the morning. The temperature sometimes dipped to forty or fifty degrees below zero, and she would have to spend a good half hour shivering in her coat and gloves before the tent truly began to warm up. She ate two or three multivitamins and a handful of dehydrated biscuits as she waited, and sometimes also a protein bar, and sometimes also a piece of chocolate, and she allowed a few chips of ice to melt on the surface of her tongue. Then she stripped to her long Johns, tightened the drawstrings of the sleeping bag around her, and listened to the side wall of the tent going taut and slack and taut again, bellying in and out as it took the wind like a sail.

On the eighth day of the storm, she was traveling on a downhill slope when a spur of rock came rearing up out of the snow and filled her windshield. Her heart rose up in her chest. She swerved to avoid the rock, but it was too late.

She rammed into the spur at the rear corner and heard the solid crunch of something breaking. The sledge spun around twice and gradually drifted to a stop. She let go of the steering mechanism. Her skin was covered in sweat, and her stomach had tightened into a knot. The droning sound of the sledge slowly died away, and its runners settled into the snow. She checked herself for wounds. She seemed to be okay – no bleeding, no broken bones – but she wasn't sure about the sledge. She climbed outside onto a half dozen chunks of rock and ice that had been knocked loose by the collision.

She made her way toward the back end of the vehicle, holding on to the upper rail with her gloves, the snow twisting around her in an obscuring shroud. She had heard stories about people who had become so disoriented in snowstorms that they had lost their sense of direction only a few feet from their front doors, people who went stumbling and weaving into the tempest with their arms stretched out in front of them like zombies. She knew better than to let go of the rail. She found the spot where the sledge had run into the spur. A long rent had been torn into the wood and metal, exposing the inside of the storage hutch. Her duffel bag was wedged inside the hole, so that only a thin crack of space remained open to the air, bordered with a row of jagged wooden teeth. She could hear the wind passing through it with a whistling noise.

She sank to her knees, probing at the snow around the runners to make sure nothing had fallen out. She couldn't feel anything – the bulge of the duffel bag seemed to have sealed the breach in the hutch. She risked a short walk uphill, heading directly toward the spur, but all she saw was a tapering strip of wood and a single, palm-sized lump of black rock. When she was satisfied that she wouldn't find anything else, she staggered back downhill. She turned the sledge around and continued along the channel of the ice stream.

It would be more than a month before she discovered exactly what she had left behind on the slope and the full consequences of her accident became clear to her.