Winter is upon us. My calendar-machine tells me that it will not arrive for several weeks, that my experiments in weather-control are dangerous and possibly immoral, and that God metes out justice even to the curious.
Winter is awful and cannot be stopped. It is the death of the year and announces this by the flashy murder of the trees, envoys of the spring.
There is a certain tempting tendency to describe pre-Winter, or “Fall,” as beautiful. How cruel to beauty words are. I do nothing but watch as children writhe around in the rotting leaves and scream, lost. We ourselves are trapped in one another, and there is no worse prison. No leaf ever tortured itself.
Such rotten butchery always evokes my own violent death, by unmanned hover-cycle, in the year 2138. I do not look forward to dying, but it always rather encourages me through its sheer improbability. At least some part of the world still understands the unfeeling.
One can look forward with a shudder to the Christmas feast, where a priest of Horus will intone: “The Sons of Revolt shall never more rise up…” I am not one, however, for holidays, and I doubt that I will sacrifice much beyond my last full head of hair and a few lame oxen.
We have to leave. The term is finished, and soon the railroad cops will ring their damned bronze bells and begin to drive us from our shanties. Last year I broke my fist on some hard-chinned Scots-Irish bastard before they got me in the cart. Surely they can’t be bewildered, who shine their torches in the dark?
To say I’m hoping for such an icy purge would be going too far. I’ve been tricked by winters past: all of January ’98 spent at the fencing club didn’t help me at all when I challenged the duke of Florence at the sixth-grade Sock Hop. Hell, last winter I tried to tame a wolf and wound up singing to the full moon on the monthly.
Skepticism fits me like a burlap cassock, so I can’t mind this compromise between aspiration and desolation.
Perhaps the winter will sweep through my mind and freeze and burn and freeze out all the weakness. Perhaps I will nurse a brandy and walk through the shopping mall, telling children the truth of an apostate Santa.
I can remember with great happiness how I spent Winter as a child, before I took it as an enemy to be fought.
I would take up my sled and toboggan, my blasting caps, my rifles, and sally forth into the blank.
The snow stung my face, and I drank heavily, in order, as the clever Russians say, “to kerosene-bomb my heart.” My shack was situated in the foothills of God’s Fangs, a local mountain range which claimed the lives of so many of my grade school chums. This allowed me to begin the ascent immediately.
Towards the summit I would be, by virtue of the glare and the wood alcohol, almost completely blind. My fingers, cracked and bloody and covered with Flintstones bandages, felt forward and grasped greedily on the smallest of handholds. A smile had frozen itself into place.
And then, without warning, there was nothing more to reach for. I had summited. My legs were numb beneath the knee, but I scrambled, reached and knelt beneath a hoary pine. I unwrapped my scarf and reeled at the pain as the wind buffeted my beardless face.
Slowly, my vision returned, and I placed my hands down into the snow. The mountain trembled at the touch, and as I lost feeling I managed to remember the secret. I blinked and looked up and there was salvation. Tears turned to glass on my cheeks in time to mirror the dying sun.