Permafrost

Fire and Ice fused with the javelin as we fell from the stars. Red lights and green dots blinked without any further orders. This was like childbirth, an explosion, followed by a black void and a white light. The cramped pod collided with the blue glass caked on top of the lake. My hands yanked against the escape hatch. The small circle of fire and ash popped against the ash. The escape hatch was no different than the safety of my mother's womb. I felt like a newborn baby, as I took my first breath.

Snow.

 I had taken it for granted as a child. I dreamed of running off to the city. They had bake shops, sweets, and ballet. We huddled around a wood stove, the muddy frost she would soak my feet in while walking to the market.

 After being surrounded by endless darkness in the pod, the white flakes now looked like manna from Heaven. Fields of green cracked through the sheets of frost. The cold whip across my face like invisible currents crashing against a life raft. I wanted to vomit again, but the pills suppressed that notion.

They gave us so many before and during the operation. I sometimes hid some under my tongue or flushed them down the toilet. My mother was locked in an asylum as a child for asking where the police were taking her neighbors. They kept her with other dissidents in the white walls. They forced pills down her mouth. She kept her sanity by creating new ways to hide the medication.

There were worse options for a cosmonaut to die. Every recruit spread the whispers of the molten astronaut that fell to Earth. smoked meat filled my senses every time I heard the tale. Soviet ingenuity failed the condemned and sealed his fate, at least traitors to the state earned a quicker death.

My mind drifted to how many tombs floated in orbit. Four-legged friends were trapped in their pods as they waited for their master’s return. There would have to be tiny claw marks on the seats and the walls. All things considered, hypothermia was a cakewalk. 

The stillness was overcome with layer after layer of static in my brain. The ringing had returned. The zig-zagged speech that screeched across the ears lodged itself inside of me It raptured the senses and replaced the soul with something from beyond the dark masses where the sun’s lights could no longer reach.

My fingers scoured my pockets like a spider searching for its next meal. I found the pills and popped them down my hatch. The static drew away from me as a wolf beat back into the woods.

My thermals were constantly kissed by the frost.

“This is for bears and wolves.” My commanding officer popped the barrels open and presented the weapon to each cadet as stern men in pressed suits watched from a two-way mirror.

“Mating season makes them volatile.”

The tips of the corona dipped beyond the mountains, the sun was going to leave me to my own devices. I struggled along the river with her gear in search of sanctuary.

The rock piles mixed with ash and bone caught the tips of my eyes at the edge of the cave.

 The black opening appeared as a passage to hades. I released a long string of mist from my lungs as I had no coin to give the ferryman into the river Styx. The flashlight burned away the darkness and revealed an empty plot. It was as good a place as any to sleep or die. It all depended if she could keep a fire going. 

The space training center briefed the cadets on what was essential.

·      8 fire starters

·      Survival Knife. Yeah, that was going to scare off the bears.

·      R-855-A1 radio. She hoped they got the Jazz channel.

·      Machete.

·      Ammunition.

   There was no use fumbling with the rest of the gear in the dark. Every minute she fumbled with her tools the temperature dropped a few degrees. She grabbed the artificial tinder from the poach and stacked a circle of rocks around the edge of the cave

There were so many who wanted a woman to fail. Not because I was a woman, but because she was the wrong woman. I wasn’t a peasant from the farms and she wasn’t a politician's daughter.

I knew nothing of the class purges or the German invasion. I did have a low tolerance for bullshit. orange droplets leaped from the small metal block. The embers brought a long-standing comfort that endured for thousands of years. Fire.

Humans used to keep pit fires to congregate, cook fresh kills and keep out the monsters.

My teeth gnashed into cold sausage and drowned it down with a half-liter of Vodka. The flashlight flickered amongst the cold snap. The chill in her bones craved fuel for the fire. The light created shadows among the broken branches. The food was enough to fuel the tank inside to brave the cold outside the cave once more. I approached deeper in the trees.

The brown hands from the small sack of clothes in the trees hung still, save for the cruel blue breeze. My mind wanted to solve that mystery of the contents inside, however, the primal animal clashed and forbade me to reveal the sacred means inside.

I left the revered trees alone and continued my search. The blue stick figures painted on the pods pointed at the ground below. I couldn’t be sure if they were a welcome or a warning.

I grabbed more than enough tinder and wood from the vacant trees for fear I would have to leave the safety of the cave before morning. The long blade would aid in shearing off the damp bark on the cold branches. My early ancestors must have felt this shiver every night as the sun went away.

The snowy path crossed heavy scratches in the trees.

 Long claw marks at the base of the trees let humans know they were being watched. These beasts stalked the woods and meadows where tribes could snatch them and their children in the dead of night anytime they wanted. 

I shouldn’t fear the unknown, it should most definitely fear me.

My blades sheared the damp bark off the dead branches the way a butcher peels the skin off cattle. Both concepts served the same purpose, death created fuel to sustain life. 

The sticks were swallowed by the flames and the food had finally hit the spot. I wanted the cave to feel like home but the void treated me like an uninvited guest.

 My eyes swore there were a thousand eyes lined with a thousand fangs, they were all waiting in the trees.

The cave and the stars were thousands of miles from the effects of East versus West. They harbored an uninviting cold void. Tribes rose up and turned to dust in what amounted to a blink of an eye. Massive beasts eventually turned to bones and dirt without so much as causing a blink for the vastness of space and time.

When mankind put away their petty squabbles we would indeed colonize the stars. On some faraway system, there would be a survivor slumping away from a doomed ship. The planet would be hostile to the foreign invader and there would be so much blood. That woman would endure. 

I cranked the radio three snaps to the left and two to the right. The hidden waves connected me to the outside world.

I snapped off the radio when the crack of the familiar eroded across my ears. Human whispers, almost prayer-like in fashion. I shrugged off the hope as a fool’s errand. Previous rescue attempts did not reach space explorers so soon and there were no official bases or camps this far in the cold.

The thought of something more arcane whipped across like a winter breeze in her mind. The wild people.

My grandmother told stories of people who escaped deep into the woods to avoid the political purges and the invasion of Berlin. They chanted in a tongue that predated the tsars and kissed the old stones at the edge of the forest. 

The shotgun no longer felt like a dead weight as I carried it like a newborn in my arms. My brain and my legs pulled me in two different directions as half of me wanted to run for the snow but the other half wanted to run towards the chapel in the caverns.

The empty steps swallowed the noise of each step. My eyes absorbed the blackness as the lights below turned the pitch into an icy blue.

Thousands of years of water dripped down the rock and cracks, forming a jagged display of an altar of ice. This was as close as a church I had set foot in, in so many years. I kept the light at foot level, shutting it off every time I heard a prayer from the choirs of blue.

Wax candles dripped down statues placed in the hollow slots in the mountain. They guided me down the steps, their heads slightly turned down the citadel.

My arm brushed against one as I adjusted the scattergun against my static-filled fingers. The statues did not push back firmly as stone or granite. It felt like leatherwork from the farm or smoked beef long out of the fire. They appeared to be once alive, but that was impossible, we were thousands of miles from… The notion I was in a world that made sense needed to be jettisoned like a life raft from a space capsule.

The glove was removed from my hand almost out of pure childlike curiosity. Ever been to a funeral as a young person? you want to touch the body and see if it moves. The pupils had sunken and the slots had resembled the vastness of the cavern itself. The bodies wrapped in stag skin and bones of long expired beasts adorned in reverence.

I had taken classes at the Institute of the people. The indigenous Slavs could not bury their dead underneath, the ground was too hard from the frost.

They created cairns and above-ground coffins.

 The subject of death was the backbone of society. We did everything to avoid it and avoid talking about it. The blackened bones did not match the hardened blue of frostbite.

These bodies were partially burned and extinguished.

I reached the bottom of the steps and the endpoint of the bodiless prayers. I witnessed a sect of acolytes massing at stone structures. They placed hand-held trinkets at the base of very large stones. They drank from the hollowed-out bowls of bone and marrow. The red liquid on their lips was placed on the stones as they kissed the cold rims of the monoliths.

Massive ribs were stacked on top of the sides of the monoliths. I matched each breath with a chant. I measured each step against the echoes. The shotgun wasn’t meant for a prolonged fight against anything that didn’t stand on four legs. I stuffed the glove in my mouth to hide the frost expanding from my lungs.

The mounds of Mammoths appeared as if they were plucked from the meadows. The heat from the smokestacks and endless cogs of industry had begun to thaw the arctic citadels. There were very few places else on earth where one could find these behemoths in such pristine condition.

On the edge of the cracked cove that faced the cooling ice, I witnessed a small woman adored in berries and bones towards the mammoth throne.

The shaman escorted her towards the altar. Small berries and leaves were placed in her mouth. The blood in the bowl was etched across her forehead.

“The Snow Witch has accepted Sasha for our tribute this season. The winter is harsh but we endure with treats and tributes. She feeds on our young ones that did not come to pass.”

The pit of my stomach dropped as I realized those pods in the trees were the remains of miscarried children. The little blue stick figures were an invitation.

“However, a long winter means that the witch will not be satisfied with our young. She seeks a living vessel to inhabit.”

The priest and his sect bound the woman and her body began to shake as if she were possessed. 

I had read of the cold itself, as being a sickness for the people that lived inside it. The nights that overtook the day blacked out the sun. The toxins in the only available animals and berries needed to survive were another theory. The shock of the ritual overwhelmed my other senses.

I didn’t notice the small embers falling around me. Small dolls ablaze fell from the top of the stairs, they withered away into greyish embers as they hit the ground. A witch was just a scapegoat. Little men needed to go to extremes to hold onto power. A bear of a man approached from the shadows. 

The acolyte’s fists were gripped tight on what appeared to be a spear, and I popped pressure on the trigger. A volley of fire, steel, and lead scattered across his body.

The weapon and the wool absorbed the impact. He shrugged off the blast and prepared for pain. I pushed through the fear and waited for the hunter to enter anywhere under eleven meters.

These guns weren’t made for sharpshooters but to make a beast think twice. I placed my finger in the hole and attempted to fire. But the ringing in my years returned. The endless orchestra of static and shrieking filled my head with numbers and visions.

No. No. NO!

I forgot to take the pills.

The behemoth kicked me toward the shore, and the gun was gone. Never to return in bothof our minds. He took a fistful of my hair and dragged me towards the water. The priest told the man to halt, this was a sacred act of service. But there was nothing but dead eyes beneath the mask.

 The winters had taken loved ones from him in the past, if they wanted winter to end faster, it was time to increase the sacrifices. He stabbed the shaman and placed let the old man bleed out in the sacred pools. The witch would drink well tonight. He placed his boot on the back of the man’s head and watched the priest struggle for air. 

The icy water gave the sensation of a thousand needle pricks as the brain cried out for solace. The beast forgot about the small woman whose life was in his hands, I counted on that. Red oozed from the mouth of the horned mask as another wave blasted the man into the water. 

If the witch was real, she would have more than enough to cease this endless winter.

I racked two more shells into the gun and retrieved the survival blade as well.

The chemicals wore off in my brain and body, and the pain replaced it. The blood leaked out of an open wound inside of my thermals. I wonder how that got there, I let a large smile reach from cheek to cheek.

The sunlight dipped in the back entrance to the cave, the blue and white never looked more beautiful. I turned the dials on the radio. this time, four turns left and one turn right.

I heard the same numbers and code speak again, followed by the cries of a rescue team desperate for my location. I searched my pockets for the pills again, I must have lost them during the knuckle drag.

I spied a trail of red leading to the monolith, son of a bitch he was still trying to perform the ritual. He was just in reach of the spear when I fired a shot into the air.

“We survive only at the mercy of the witch.”

He took his bloody handprint and removed the mask. I bore witness to the valleys of scars and bumps across my face.

“Every season begging for warmth and an end to winter.” I watched the beast become a boy as he described the horror he dares not speak.

“So, when the state sends money and machines, we see it as a miracle.” The men were paid to harvest strange things past the meadows, the place their grandmothers told us not to follow the whispers in the wood.

“The smoke and the machines melted down the ice.” He spun a story of the impossible.

“They wanted the berries and the bodies hidden under the ice. One by one, a plague spread throughout the camps.” I had heard of such operations during the sleepless nights in the space program.

 The Kremlin needed weapons of the future. The buried beasts and humans had diseases modern man had no immunities to. Scientists from the Eastern Bloc looked for alternative means to fight Americans' minds.

“The witch cursed us, and we must provide an offering for desecrating the dead.”

The pills they gave us, we had to take them and log in the results every waking hour. They smelled like the winterberries in the woods. The medicine wasn’t for preventing madness, they wanted to induce it.

The old dead ways were reborn out of desperation.

My radio sprang to life as numbers and codes spouted off as nonsense, but it only gibberish to anyone who didn’t have an enigma. I dropped it back on the ice. I placed the winterberries and leaves in the mouth of the man who tried to have me killed, who most likely killed scores of others. 

I forced my legs to move up the stairs and towards the extinguished embers of my pitiful campfire. I spied the meadows and imagined the witch waiting for me. When the abyss stares at you, you can only blow it a kiss right back.