The wind is blowing. The sky is white. The ground is white. The window is white.
It’s a good day to be indoors. I’m sitting at the window and will sit here all day and I will watch the nothing, the lovely white nothing that’s eaten outside.
And we will tell stories.
***
I tell the wind about my week. How I hid from it, here in the warmth behind the walls where it can’t find me. it doesn’t mind, I can tell. How I took in proteins and carbohydrates and expelled waste. How I spent nearly a third of it in torpor, electrical currents dying down to a smoulder in my skull. How I watch the snow whip through its breath and imagine patterns in it.
It tells me about where it’s been, where it’s come from. Hot and cold clashing violently far above me, far away from me, sending it howling down and far away from its cold homes to scour the warmer places, to strip away their warm blanket and leave them shivering in the storm. Of the trees it felled. Of the animals it froze. Of the stones it cracked. Of the lights it put out.
Both our stories are very repetitive. We’ve told them all a thousand times. Life is like that, but so is everything else.
***
The next day I have to go get more firewood.
The wind is waiting.
We play our little game that we do every time, and it’s in high spirits now. It whips and whistles at my ears, my legs, my hands. I numb right through my clothing, my teeth shake inside my head until it feels they might fall out; my hands freeze to the axe and I almost chop my foot off six times as the fog creeps in from around my thoughts.
I laugh and laugh and laugh and it laughs too, howling and wailing at my ears until there’s no sound and all until I kick in my door and stagger in and light the fire that puts things back into the world.
Oh, that was a close one. It nearly had me today, it did. Oh it nearly had me today.
***
I go walking. The wind walks with me.
We talk as we go, about aimless things. Fancies and flights and hopes and dreams and imaginary frivolities. I remember the last time I had hot chocolate. It whispers about the drifts it pushes under trees and into thickets, where the deer are hiding from it. I tell it about the time when all this was green, and it laughs at me until my cheeks are numb and white from grinning into it.
The wind knows all this was white before it was green, and it will be again, and again, and again. It proves its point when I fall waist-deep into it, am smothered in it, nearly drowned in its leavings, a heaped-up mound that covered a dimple in the path and created a sinkhole that would make quicksand blush.
I dig myself out with my fingers and my guts and my heat and as I pull myself up my the roots and branches at closest grasp I shake someone’s hand.
It’s strange to feel that. It’s not at all like mine feels.
Oh, and there’s a wrist and a palm and an arm and an elbow and a whole body with a face, a human face!
How surprising.
The wind is surprised by this too, and it mutters itself into astonished silence the whole way home.
I bring the human. It’s something new. I don’t know how to feel about something new. Maybe further examination will tell me.
***
The human wakes up after three days. It makes noises at me with its mouth and its hands and its eyes. I think it’s trying to communicate with me.
I talk to it back. I’m not sure it understands. The fur above its eyes bunches when I talk.
Instead, we eat. It’s very grateful for the soup.
The wind is annoyed with me for missing our talk today, but it’s a slow day. It always gets irksome on the slow days. I leave it to fuss and play with its drifts, pushing them hither and thither and piling them up thick and tall against the windows until it’s not fierce and sure white anymore but a soft comfortable grey that puts the whole world to sleep.
When I wake up, the human has made some sort of tea.
It’s not hot chocolate, but boy is it close. I thank it. It doesn’t understand, but it understands. I don’t understand it myself.
***
The next day the human follows me out when I chop wood. I wield the axe and it stacks the logs and we make faster work than before and we’re set and done before I’ve even lost track of all my fingers. The wind is howling hard, but it can’t outrace us, and I chuckle a little at its discomfort. It kicks snow at us as we scurry back inside, and I think the murmuring is excessively petulant as we feed the fire back up to a snarling height.
The human conscripts some scraps and snarls of old torn bedding I’d thrown away and begins to incorporate them into its clothing. It works with thread, makes new patterns out of nothing, turns openings into closings.
It hums as it works. It’s a quite quiet sound. The wind is very loud.
But I can hear it all the same.
***
I wake up because something heavy and cold has fallen on me and it’s the roof, and when I try to move I realize it’s also a tree.
The wind has grown irate with me, it seems.
I talk to it, I complain at it. I even whine. But it’s not listening, it’s not talking, it’s just yelling and ranting and howling to itself now.
I thought we were friends!
I really, really thought we were friends.
Well, not friends. On speaking terms, at least.
The human digs me out. The human pulls me out. The human drags me to the unburied corner of the house and as luck would have it that’s the corner with the fireplace, so bit by bit all the feeling creeps back into me and I can feel my face again.
I say ‘thank you,’ with it.
It shocks both of us so much we don’t dare say anything until we fall asleep.
***
The wind is in my dreams.
It stands outside the door and scrapes against it with paws made of hail and sleet and snow, its voice almost silent. It is angry with me, it’s so very angry with me, that I am not paying attention. And I try, and I try, and I try, and I try, but I just can’t hear the words.
The wind breaks the door in and starts gnawing on my foot. I kick it. The wind grunts and huffs and shuffles off and turns into a bear and I wake up and watch the bear leave.
Oh.
The fire is out. The door is shattered. And judging by the oodles of bear tracks, it finished off the potatoes before it investigated my foot.
The house is no longer livable, and I’m only alive because the human and me turned each other into pillows in the middle of the night.
It’s time to go.
***
Sixteen miles past the edge of my world and the snowdrifts get deeper. The crust grows more uneven. Even the snowshoes the human bent together from tired pine boughs founder and stick.
The wind is most unhappy.
I don’t understand it now, in more ways than one. First it wanted me dead, now it wants me to stay? We shared so many stories together, we shared so many days together, I saw so much of me and it so much of I and nothing I saw would make it want to do this, any of this.
I wonder what it thought it saw in me?
I fall in another drift and that distracts us for a while longer.
***
Nightfall comes, and with it comes the white-in-the-black, the wall of frozen water that comes in hard and fast and furious, without mercy. We dig into a drift, then dig out an airhole, then dig it out again, and again, and again. The whole world is trying to bury us at the wind’s behest.
We are very good diggers, me and the human. But we are not an entire world.
So I pat them on their shoulder, and I take their hand and squeeze it, as if I were trying to warm them, and I start walking.
The wind’s roaring like a lion now. All brag and boast. It’s won, it’s won, it’s won.
And then it dies down, to a soft murmur again, all familiar and softness. Whispering to my ears, trying to tell me of things very far away that it’s seen and done and been and I can’t understand any of it, not one word.
Not since I’ve been listening to the human.
The human.
Oh.
It didn’t want to kill ME.
***
Oh it rages when I turn around. Oh how it shakes and rattles at my bones. But I know it’s bluffing now, it’s baring empty teeth at me, and I find the snowed-in shelter before it’s vanished entire and dig through before the air runs out.
The human isn’t moving. It’s probably very tired.
So I pick them up. They’re heaving, and they’re bulky, but so is a sack of potatoes.
One foot, two foot, one foot, two foot.
Oh how the wind is screaming!
One foot, two foot, one foot, two foot.
I can’t understand it at all. What a shame. What an awful shame.
***
It’s a one foot that makes the first mark in the white.
A dark smudge left behind in my bootmarks.
The two foot follows.
And then it gets deeper.
And deeper.
And deeper.
Soil is coming through. Soil and mud are clotting up my bootprints, melting up into the snow.
The wind is spitting mad now, but it’s spit. It’s froth. Sleet at best, wet and nasty against my face.
And then one foot two foot one foot two foot and I’m through, and it’s through, and I’m standing up to my ankles in mud and slush and the sky is a painfully normal blue, with a drunkenly bright sun, and there are birds calling again like I haven’t heard them in.
Ever?
No, that’s not right.
I’ve been here before.
Yes, I’ve been here before. A lot.
I turn around and look at my footsteps. Look at the green sprouting softly out of the cold and into the warm. I flex my fingers, feel the numbness long gone.
I breathe deep, and when I exhale, the trees bud.
Oh.
Oh.
Well.
A naughty thing to do, that wind. To lull me to sleep for so long.
But spring is here now. I am here, by the flow and churn of the overfed creeks, by the hot sun and the dying gales. I am here and the animals are moving again.
I hope that bear enjoyed the potatoes.
I hope that human is alright. They seem warm enough. Such a long trip they made to find me, there away from everything, all by myself.
So I make them a pillow of moss, and a blanket of ferns, and I sit in the rising sun and wait and listen to the long-lost ghostly trembling echoes of the wind.