Elizabeth Bear - Long Cold Day

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2024-11-24 0 0 43.05KB 14 页 5.9玖币

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Long Cold Day

by Elizabeth Bear

Remarkably, Christian Whittaker went to bed sober one cold Wednesday night, the

last day of February, in 1976. Whittaker was a big, blunt man, broken-veined, with a

habitual drunk's coarseness of skin and voice. He wasn't astoundingly fat, but he had

an astounding ring of fat around his neck: jowls and a double chin that fell over his

throat and collar and two thick cushions on either side of his spine below his ears,

like the hams on a hog. He wore a wedding ring because his hands were spongy with

retained fluid; he could never take it off.

Whittaker shuffled along Maple Street, careless of meltwater rivulets frozen across

the sidewalk. Clouds snagged like handfuls of cotton wool on the mountains

bounding a vast, torn, oceanic sky. White on white on gray, snowcapped peaks

sweeping down to snow-frosted foothills that cupped a low, cold valley.

His gloves were old; his hands were shoved into his pockets against the cold. There

was a hole in the thumb of the right-hand one. He idly rasped the hair on his leg

against the skin with his thumb as he walked. His legs burned with wind through the

cloth of his jeans.

He was drunk. Not very drunk, not by Whittaker's standards, but enough that the

cold didn't hurt as much as it should have. He saw a woman walk past, though,

headed in the other direction, her child walking in front of her. The little boy's coat

was threadbare corduroy, not warm enough for the iron of the day, and his mother

had cupped her blue naked fingers over his ears.

Whittaker turned his head inside its ox-collar of flesh to watch them pass. The

woman ducked her chin and wouldn't meet his eyes, her shoulders hunched toward

her ears with cold or fear.

Whittaker thought of his own boy, Tony. He thought of Tony shivering in an

apartment that went unheated half the time, and he stopped on the sidewalk, his

hands knotting in his pockets. Cold. It was always cold; he couldn't remember when

he'd last seen a buttercup edging between sidewalk slabs or flicked the head off a

dandelion with his thumbnail. He half-thought those things were fantasies, childhood

fancies carried through to adulthood—the Easter bunny, Santa Claus.

But the warmth had to come and go, didn't it? Warmth enough to melt the snow

where it lay against the earth, so it slumped in curves and hollows and sent trickles of

meltwater across the sidewalks to freeze in treacherous ridges. Warmth enough to

drip icicles from eaves like accelerated stop-motion stalactites.

Whittaker wished he could remember the last time he'd seen the sun. He turned

around his left foot, not a smooth pivot but a stumping spiral, and stared up at the

mountains, the clouds bunched and tangled around their peaks. He shivered in his

too-small coat.

Tony would be cold. Even colder. Whittaker ducked his head as he faced into the

wind; it sheared into his sinuses like glass. His boots were scuffed, almost scoured

across the toes. Fractal salt stains spidered up the leather like frost-flowers, grasping

at his cuffs.

A white coupe sat by the curb, engine running. Long piratical plumes of exhaust

curled from the tailpipe, whipped forward by the same wind that was suffocating

Whittaker. He contemplated stealing the car, driving it home, piling Jessica into the

passenger seat and Tony in back, and driving until they reached someplace warm.

He could hear her voice, almost, if he listened for it. Go ahead, Chris. Do what you

have to do.

He heard things sometimes. He was used to it.

He waded through plowed snow to the car and pulled his gloved hand from his

pocket. It took concentration to uncurl the fist. His entire body wanted to clench,

tendon by tendon, bone by bone. He reached for the handle of the passenger-side

door, the door against the curb. Chrome shocked through his gloves; when he

snatched his hand back his fingers caught, ice cracked off the handle, and the door

swung open. The plow had scruffed snow into ice, big yellow-black chunks, and the

door thumped solidly when it struck the smut-marked bank.

It was warm in the car. Cigarette-scented air puffed past him, easing the ache in his

sinuses, a breeze from a summer day. Whittaker bent forward, grunting, hands on

his knees and then on the seat as he shoved his bulk inside, reaching out to brush the

keys with a fingertip. He crawled across the passenger seat, a yellow patchwork quilt

bunching under his knee, his pants riding up his calf and allowing an arctic gust to

caress gooseflesh.

He didn't fit. The dashboard shoved against his hip. The stick shift jabbed his thigh.

He should have gone to the driver's side. He shouldn't be here at all.

"Hey!" The first cry tattered, but the second one strong. "Hey, you son of a bitch.

Hey!"

Whittaker flinched, shoved backward, boot slipping on rilled ice. He bruised hip and

elbow, shoulder and ass, on the doorframe while wriggling loose. He didn't fall, but

he slipped, twisted, wrenching his knee. Something tangled his legs; his hands

clenched in fear as he clawed at it. He didn't turn, didn't glance over his shoulder to

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Elizabeth Bear - Long Cold Day

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