Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

"I don't see why we couldn't at least give the Ouija board thing a shot." The man made a rolling little high-pitched horror-movie note. "They came from beyond the grave!"

Puckett passed behind a clump of trees, and soon their voices faded away.

At the bus bench on the corner of Georgia and Sixty-fifth, a man with motor oil stains on his clothing was adjusting himself through the pocket of his pants. Puckett remembered some twenty car mechanics, though he was pretty sure he had already written them all down; he would have to check his list to make sure.

At the lower end of the golf course, a blind man was feeling his way down the sidewalk, tugging on the rigging of his beard. Puckett could remember at least six blind people.

He was almost home when he saw Joyce stepping out of a jeweler's shop, hunching his shoulders as the wind struck his face. He suddenly felt a tremendous weariness in his bones. Maybe it was the walk, or maybe it was his conversation with the English teacher, or maybe it was just the effort of thinking about his brother after so long, but the last thing he wanted right now was another pointless argument.

He ducked beneath an awning and waited for him to pass. Joyce was listening to his watch, shaking his wrist as he held it to his ear, and he did not see him. Puckett watched him cross the street at the corner. Then he moved out of the doorway, blew a long breath of warm air into his hands, and felt the first tingle of frost on his cheek.

He looked up into the sky, a loosely swirling motion of gray and white flakes.

Not this again, he thought.

It was snowing.

Ice. Frost. Frosting. Crossing. Railroad crossing. Railroad train. Fabric train. Wedding dress. Wedding ring. Ring of fire. Ring of ice. Ice. Iceberg. Glacier. Razor. Stubble. Stumble. Fall. October. November. December. Christmas. Xmas. X marks the spot. Treasure. Gold. Silver. Silver Bells. Jingle Bells. Open sleigh. Snow. Ice. Rice. Mice. Cats. Whiskers. Scissors. Paper. Paper angels. Angel food cake. Nectar of the gods. Ambrosia. Ambrose Bierce. Mexico. Mexican. Jumping bean. Jump rope. Rope bridge. Chasm. Crevice. Ice floe. Iceberg. Ice.

As Laura strained at the sledge, the words snapped back and forth in her head like a racquetball, a continuously rolling blue whir that she made no effort to stop or control. She was trying to find one word for every step she took, looking for that ideal balance of physical and mental locomotion that would keep her from thinking too hard about whether she would make it to the penguin roost, and what she would find if she got there, and what difference it would make if all the reports she had read were true and everyone, everyone in the world, everyone she had ever known, was dead.

She did not know – did not want to know – the answer. Answer. Question. Mention. Tension.

Her hauling stride measured slightly more than a foot – a foot and four inches, say – which meant (she did the math) that she could expect to cover one mile, roughly, for every thirty-five hundred words she came up with. If her bearings were correct, she had eighteen miles and sixty-three thousand words to go. The sledge had shut down on her shortly after she crossed Fog Bay, sinking onto its runners on a flat stretch of perfectly ridgeless ice. The flippers had locked and the whole immense carriage had coasted slowly across the ice, razoring a full six inches into the snow before it scraped to a stop. She had tried everything she could think of to get the engine running again. She was no mechanic, though, and it quickly became clear to her that it was broken beyond her capacity for repair.

Which was not to say that it was broken beyond any capacity for repair. The problem might have been something as simple as a spent fuel cell or a snapped electrical connection. But without reliable tools, good lighting, and replacement supplies, she knew she was out of luck. She stood in the cold with her face in her hands. The snow beneath her boots was loose and high. The wind made the surface stir with thousands of tiny flexing snakes. She climbed back into the steering compartment of the sledge, where the heat was quickly draining away, and shut the door.

She had already traveled most of the way around the hump of Ross Island, and it made no sense for her to turn back now. She remembered that old joke about the man who swam three quarters of the distance across a river, decided he was too tired to go any further, swung around in the water, and swam back to shore. In the version she had heard the man was Canadian, though in certain areas of the country he was probably Mexican. And immediately across the border, to either the north or the south, he was almost certainly an American.

American. Yank. Tug. Tugboat. Engine.

There was only one option open to Laura – that was how she saw it.

She couldn't turn around, and she couldn't stay where she was, so she would have to keep going. She waited until she felt the last of the heat slip away, then took the harness and skis out of the storage hutch, clipped the skis onto her feet, and fastened herself to the front of the sledge.

She leaned into the harness and tried to pull forward. It was impossible. The sledge was a house, the sledge was a whale. She strained so hard that one of her skis pierced the snow, plunging through the crust with a sound like tearing paper. Her left leg sank down to the knee. She lifted herself out and tried again. This time she used both of her poles for leverage, leaning into the wind, her shoulders hunched and spread to give herself as much muscle as possible. She took one step, and then another, and then a third. Perhaps the traces were stretching slightly, but the sledge did not move. She decided she would have to lighten her load. She simply wouldn't make it otherwise.

The sledge came in two main pieces: the steering compartment and the storage hutch. She began by detaching the steering compartment from the runners, unfastening the couplings that joined it to the storage hutch and sliding it off onto the snow. It rested on the surface for a few seconds before its sharp edges punched through the crust, leaving a perfect four-by-four-foot square. Then she took the shovel out of the back of the storage hutch, which was still attached to the runners, and worked the snow loose from around the steering compartment's door. She filled the compartment with everything she thought she could do without: a few bundles of clothing, three thick pieces of plywood, her sunblock, of course, the second of her two cooking pots, and the chest that carried her frozen food, which she had already emptied into the storage hutch. Whatever she left behind, she reasoned, she would be able to pick up again on her return trip.

She shut the door, strapped herself into her harness, and yanked on the sledge's traces. Reluctantly it began to move – very slowly at first, then less slowly. After her first few strides, she fell into a gliding motion that carried her steadily but strenuously over the ice. The steering compartment disappeared behind her. The sledge was so much lighter than it had been before. It was half a house now, half a whale.

A whale. A wail. A good, hard cry. A gnashing of the teeth.

Laura remembered how she had begun grinding her teeth shortly after she started working for Coca-Cola. It was something she had done in her sleep, unconsciously and entirely without memory. She would wake up in the morning with her jaw aching and have no idea why, until the day her dentist noticed that her enamel had been worn down as smooth as pearl. "Frankly, I've never seen a mouth go so bad so quickly," he told her. "It looks like you put your teeth through a rock tumbler." He scouted around in her mouth for a while with a penlight, then switched the light off, looked her in the eyes, and said, "Have you ever considered therapy?"