He sits in the chair at his office desk that is concaving in the middle from too much use underneath too much weight. Early that very same morning, he awoke with a pounding headache that was like an alarm alerting him to what day it was. He considered taking off of work, but he knew that wouldn’t do anything for him except give him the opportunity to wallow in nothingness without any chance of accountability. So here he sits instead, staring down at the files he is supposed to be charting. He sticks one in the paper shredder, once, twice, and the ripped up, destroyed pieces of it scatter down into the waste basket like snow falling to rest on the ground.
He used to love the snow. When he was younger, his mother, his younger sister and he would trek down through the layers of snow and ice, a land that looked like the inside of their freezer, to the frozen lake behind their house. Here, they would take pickaxes to the thick, stubborn layer of ice until chunks of it came apart, looking like solid blocks and cubes of white cheese. They would carry this ice back up to the house—the temperatures were so cold that there really wasn’t the worry that the ice would melt before they got there. Their mother would use the ice to make them a “snowstorm in a glass” as she would call it. This involved placing the ice in three glasses and adding sugar water to it so that it would swirl around, looking like the blizzard they had that snowbound them to their house the year his little sister was born.
One morning, their mother was busy with making dinner for their grandmother who was coming over later on that evening for a family get together. After much begging and pleading, their mother acquiesced and allowed the children to take the hike down to the lake to get some ice for the special treat they shared together.
Upon arrival, he taunted his little sister the way that older brothers do, giving her a soft nudge so that she stumbled in the snow.
“I’ll race you out there,” he teased. He knew she would probably take the bait—being the youngest, she always felt the need to prove herself.
“I dunno, brother,” she said, seeming smaller, more fragile, than ever before, as if she would blow away, body scattering like snow dust. “We really aren’t supposed to.”
He rolled his eyes at her and then took off running across the frozen lake. His feet slid around the ice the way they always did when his mom poured a bucket of water on the kitchen floor to mop it. Laughing, he glanced back and saw his sister chasing him, her face growing brighter than all the candles they lit on Hanukkah. He opened his mouth to call to her when a resounding crack broke the still, winter air around them. To this day, he still has never heard anything quite like it. He spun around just as his sister skidded, arms flailing, to a halt. It seemed as if the crack shot between them for a suspended second before the ice gave way beneath her and she disappeared from sight.
Shouting in both horror and shock, he rushed forward, his legs splaying and flailing around him as if he was a newborn deer trying to walk for the first time. Desperation stung every inch of his body, the winter air biting at each sliver of revealed skin.
By the time he had reached her, another layer of ice was forming around the hole that had opened wide, hungry for his sister. She was underneath it, banging on the ice with her fists, bubbles bursting from her mouth the way they used to when they would blow bubbles in their bath water. He tried to break the ice, but to no avail. Tears freezing on his wind-beaten face, and amidst his sister’s muffled calls for him, he slid to the snow-covered shore and grabbed the pickax. However, before he made it back to her, his sister had disappeared completely, nothing but dark black water beneath the ever hardening layer of ice.
When his sister died, he watched grief chip away at his mother in the same way the men chipped away at the ice over the lake to find his sister’s body. His mother became someone hard, cold, distant as if she might as well have been the one at the bottom of the cavern.
He glances at the clock, and see that it’s almost time for him to leave work. He watches as the second hand on the clock ticks by, barely moving, until it seems to him as if it’s come to a complete standstill. Eventually, his buddy comes by, makes an offhand comment about it being closing time, and he follows him out.
The air outside is brisk, blowing by him with such ferocity that it makes his cheeks raw and painful. He winces against the winter air that scratches at his wrists and neck like a puppy that is welcoming an old friend home. Snow is falling down on him, landing in his hair, on his shoulders, in his eyes as he stares up at the darkening sky. He shakes the snow out of his hair, runs his rough hands over his burning face and heads to a bar where he will spend the rest of the night drowning, drowning, drowning.
