White and Other Tales of Ruin

We ate our stale breakfast, drank tea clotted with powdered milk, listened to the silence outside. It had snowed again in the night and our tracks from the day before had been obliterated. Standing at the sink to wash up I stared through the window, and it was like looking upon the same day as yesterday, the day before, and the day before that; no signs of our presence existed. All footprints had vanished, all echoes of voices swallowed by the snow, shadows covered with another six inches and frozen like corpses in a glacier. I wondered what patterns and traces the snow would hold this evening, when darkness closed in to wipe us away once more.

“We have to tell someone,” Charley said. “Something’s happening, we should tell someone. We have to do something, we can’t just…” She trailed off, staring into a cooling cup of tea, perhaps remembering a time before all this had begun, or imagining she could remember. “This is crazy.”

“It’s God,” Rosalie said.

“Huh?” Hayden was already peeling wrinkled old vegetables ready for lunch, constantly busy, always doing something to keep his mind off everything else. I wondered how much really went on behind his fringed brow, how much theorising he did while he was boiling, how much nostalgia he wallowed in as familiar cooking smells settled into his clothes.

“It’s God, fucking us over one more time. Crazy, as Charley says. God and crazy are synonymous.”

“Rosie,” I said, knowing she hated the shortened name, “if it’s not constructive, don’t bother. None of this will bring — ”

“Anything is more constructive than sod-all, which is what you lot have got to say this morning. We wake up one morning without one of us dead, and you’re all tongue-tied. Bored? Is that it?”

“Rosalie, why — ”

“Shut it, Charley. You more than anyone should be thinking about all this. Wondering why the hell we came here a few weeks ago to escape all the shit, and now we’ve landed right in the middle of it. Right up to our armpits. Drowning in it. Maybe one of us is a Jonah and it’s followed — ”

“And you think it’s God?” I said. I knew that asking the question would give her open opportunity to rant, but in a way I felt she was right, we did need to talk. Sitting here stewing in our own thoughts could not help anyone.

“Oh yes, it’s His Holiness,” she nodded, “sitting on his pedestal of lost souls, playing around one day and deciding, hmm, maybe I’ll have some fun today, been a year since a decent earthquake, a few months since the last big volcano eruption. Soooo, what can I do?”

Ellie appeared then, sat at the table and poured a cup of cold tea that looked like sewer water. Her appearance did nothing to mar Rosalie’s flow.

“I know, he says, I’ll nudge things to one side, turn them slightly askew, give the world a gasp before I’ve cleaned my teeth. Just a little, not so that anyone will notice for a while. Get them paranoid. Get them looking over their shoulders at each other. See how the wrinkly pink bastards deal with that one!”

“Why would He do that?” Hayden said.

Rosalie stood and put on a deep voice. “Forget me, will they? I’ll show them. Turn over and open your legs, humanity, for I shall root you up the arse.”

“Just shut up!” Charley screeched. The kitchen went ringingly quiet, even Rosalie sitting slowly down. “You’re full of this sort of shit, Rosie. Always telling us how we’re being controlled, manipulated. Who by? Ever seen anyone? There’s a hidden agenda behind everything for you, isn’t there? If there’s no toilet paper after you’ve had a crap you’d blame it the global dirty-arse conspiracy!”

Hysteria hung silently in the room. The urge to cry grabbed me, but also a yearning to laugh out loud. The air was heavy with held breaths and barely restrained comments, thick with the potential for violence.

“So,” Ellie said at last, her voice little more than a whisper, “let’s hear some truths.”

“What?” Rosalie obviously expected an extension of her foolish monologue. Ellie, however, cut her down.

“Well, for starters has anyone else seen things in the snow?” Heads shook. My own shook as well. I wondered who else was lying with me. “Anyone seen anything strange out there at all?” she continued. “Maybe not the things Brand and Boris saw, but something else?” Again, shaken heads. An uncomfortable shuffling from Hayden as he stirred something on the gas cooker.

“I saw God looking down on us,” Rosalie said quietly, “with blood in his eyes.” She did not continue or elaborate, did not go off on one of her rants. I think that’s why her strange comment stayed with me.

“Right,” said Ellie, “then may I make a suggestion. Firstly, there’s no point trying to get to the village. The snow’s even deeper than it was yesterday, it’s colder and freezing to death for the sake of it will achieve nothing. If we did manage to find help, Boris and Brand are long past it.” She paused, waiting for assent.

“Fair enough,” Charley said quietly. “Yeah, you’re right.”