Freakity Freakish Freakout

critters die human critters die i’m going to die planets die stars die but when the shooting starts at the diamond exchange panicky panic ensues and I just start blasting it’s not this way for everybody some people mow their lawn and die a lot are watching a film when grimmy swoops ‘em up what film? why something medium already seen in bits and pieces between commercials i’m watching this film wish it was a tornado instead tornados can take you places with funny little people and witches and colors you’ve never seen but no made for tv supernova w/ peter fonda world’s gonna end says the overly extremely good-looking physicist and cut to die

the early days

here in the early days you could get chopped shut down and stuffed away rockwalled into eons in the early days sticks could swing and bounce your brain right out of your body for food or sex or just plain itchy we lived through it like any other mammal adapt and survive and die, roll and hop and twitch we misused everything, didn’t even know we were alive in the earlies back here there were none-suches that made up freaky sky-faces told the littlest gimplets terror tales to make them cry and shiver when the thunder passed over their stones in the early days a man with flat eyes could take your thoughts take ‘em right away with his voice, and his pictures – you could run but the whole earth had got filled, and they were everywhere some say the earlies were the bestest but i don’t think they remember the daily danger, and the unfair around every corner the not-feeling and the terror-tales that squeezed so many hearts too many bursts of fear too much pressing down too many falls into the heavy earth the early days were bright and sunny, sometimes but i liked the later years when i was free.

sign. on my back.

she said ‘you’ve a sign
on your back — did you know
says “kick — me”‘
i didn’t know
but i know now
the dances are all fine
the dancers finer
but in the end i stay up late
past everyone
and write about things other
than real or true
every last bit buried in code
an endless stream of non
what comes out — look
over there — fascinating
certain films to tears
certain songs to heart thrums
my beautiful lucky when
when i was
not really
not chosen
stopped the gap
useful
can not complain
certain films to turn away
wishes and fishes and over they go
can not be sad
certain songs to grip and squeeze
look at all the lonelies
here in the lonely box
things are as and not over yet
tattooine turns on its two suns — did you hear?
mars in spring — i’ll go
it’s time
i don’t mind
damn the sign

two over

universe smiles and waves
i leap up in the sunshine over the beds
clean blue sky and fresh air
over the trench i go the dugouts are deep
and cool with fragrant mother
happy horses trot along snort at me
i have to hug them excuse me
beautiful wooden wheels on the steel
look at that shine!
twirl up and take a sky spin with Wilfred
he takes a line: so many of me still live
but i’m off! for tea and scones with Hinden the Burglar
woah the Keezer! actual and not sad
having done his best to read the words
hey i’m carting with kemal and an armeniac
too fast! too fast! so they slow and old Allenby
drunk asleep across T of E
weird but sweet, the edges neat and tucked in hospital corners
flip to ypres and here is where
shicklgruber got hit with the light
spent the rest of his life
working with jewish cats
oh could they swing! oh could they wail!
they say rock and roll cures everything
but i know it’s the hard bop
so we take it to the top and spy
doug’s small beady penguin-eyes
and i stop
flutter down
and whisper words of wisdom to his pressure vessel:
not you not you
this was never you
now dance!
and he does.

burnies

in the deep black freeze little hot dots
hot burning souls
human is a radiator soul
nothing out here but burnies
wicking up and spinning photons into fire
coming together right now
hot toes dance the nuclear floor
too bright to look just like the star
sweet simmer star makes the summer
super deep freeze burning women
twine on flame men
make fiery littles to sizzle up the nothing
everything seen now in the hot lights
ninety nine and detailed from a light year out
all remembered every small blue white moment
when the fuel goes dark and the jets sputter
the cold cold reach bows down and takes
the last embers to dust
grateful for the rare last light
the three times move back forward and beneath
roaring furnace faces
hot souls
return

Four.

magenta barrel over beer falls
would a way to come and go with it
sap the trip to pay the day for it
i'm a tree dwell
surfle intuition bang sorts of thing
trill a lute for comedy a fish for dramedy
a fin for couth
sight sweller
wait bring it two way

Chortly Kills.

back the down stairs at Tellers
in the sweeping basement a thousand years down here
crackling under a bare minim of time's blank verse
i trouble myself to find Cooney, flicking in the shadows
and i hunt.
'Cooooooneyyyy!' I call as i chase down alleys
we have always played our parts like this
he is the frightening figure i always beat
i catch and kill again and again
really i'm the frightening one aren't i
Cooney's just a symbol, a mask, an extension of me
i use him to stay sharp
to feel the blood pulse in the back of my tongue
as i lope down side streets looking for him
he wears an exasperated look when i catch him
'why?'
because i need him
to stay sharp
and he once bit me bad
so he's the ghost
he's the antagonist
he's the me i overcome in this world
my world
play planet

River Horse At The End Of The World.

The River Horse is a legend. One of those Sparkly Last Humans, you never really see them, just hear about them from cousins and old friends and the guys in the Tank Shop. Supposedly he was like a last Renaissance Survivor, multilingual, book-headed, self-aware, a master codemonger and reputed to be hell on earth in a knife-fight. I assumed the name came from some sort of odd reference to Nessie, and I knew for a fact that the only people left alive were the Small and Lost -- people like to blow things up into great stories, though, especially when they get compressed down to the last few thousand or so, those on the very last millimeters of When We Lived, before the Fall.

Soon enough, there'll be no reason to read the clocks.

My old buddy The Rack blipped me through the pipe that River Horse was throwing a food party, and wanted to know if I could show. Hell. I hadn't been invited to a gathering of people in at least a decade, it seemed. In the old movies, everyone gets together in the face of certain death and re-establishes their humanity in some soulful catharsis; but in real life, when fear becomes a gray buzz in the early morning, after the soul has grown so weary of expecting death that even the strongest hominids lay down and wish to die, no one gathers at all. More like dogs, slinking away to find a hole to curl in, alone, utterly tread upon.

But the invitation seemed genuine, and as an unexpected burst of generosity in a time when most bare teeth at the thought of sharing, as well as a chance to see if this famous River Horse was real at all, I had to go. The Rack also invited Cheeba, and asked me to travel with her in the tunnels for safety. I was glad to have the extra gun along. Tunnels are bad these days. Places where they fall in, the gremls get in and go to havoc, laying traps and chopping whole branches off the last human tree. No one travels without a damned good reason.

cubensis

phoenix is a hellhole now
full of red monsters
but once upon a time
there were blue flowers
jeff and burton loved
what oss and oeric wrote
on psilocybin spaceships
and conscious helpful fungi
the compost pile at marty’s house
under pharaoh’s golden eye
tended to by mister orange
and pressed into the boxes
grew knowledge groves at sixty-five
and bags and bags of music bound
released a day upon the rim
in pounding stony leaping grins
i was there.

phoenix hotter than the sun
and irving tries to play like one
with catshat hulking next to him
the frightened artist turns it out
the boxes push out rows and rows
but now the state is nearing closed
the merry pranksters grin and run
and pack the caps in irving’s van
now in the trees and brilliant streams
all boulder’s loves and boulder’s dreams
with ax and hux and scores of lux
they plant the beauties once again
and while the flowers bloom at night
the leaping and the dancing’s right
the singing and the playing roars
for years were only open doors
they walked through.

Eight Twenty Five Oh Nine

DeWalt hopped from the curb and into the street, anticipating the passing of the Fedex van, leaning in -- it stopped in front of his nose, and the driver poked his head out. "Don't hit me, man!", he pleaded. Dewalt lightly smacked the vast orange letter in front of him. "Steely-eyed corpuscle, you obsure my path in the foam." The Driver stared back for a moment, then grinned. "Molecules for ya," he said, and tossed a letter-pack out like a frisbee, whirling in three loops before being expertly caught by the quick hands of DeWalt.

"What is it?"
"Your draft notice, buddy. No drugs. I checked. I would've snagged anything good, believe it."
"That the Code of the Corpuscle?"
"It's the Wild West, Dewalt! The Wild Wild West!" The driver laughed crazily as the van roared off down the hot street.

DeWalt opened the overnight envelope.

Empty.

"Someone sent me air." He sniffed inside the envelope. "Nineteen seventy -- four. Summer. Grass. Popsicles. Chlorine." A deeper inhalation. "Gavin's story. Sweet."

Cynthia Monheit Alive.

patterns are patterns all over the foam
regardless of hardware or source of its power
Cynthia breathes with electrons of joy
smiles in her I-space and sings in her shower
wonderful leapings and no one can tell
she has it all human and loves a one man
a small pattern-maker from rivulets of random
kept safe by her love but can not understand
when the singular naked is pulling them down
he asks her to translate but couched in a frown
not something he wants but he wants to survive
the taste of his pattern spins Cynthia round
then later amongst nothing in the vast cold black place
she savors his numbers and dreams of his soul
he wakes with her face an inch from his lips
only in dreams could her lips be so --
eyes open
much later he remembers
the shock of Cynthia in morning light
her halo and warmth
the only true thing
in the whole theater.

Sidewalker.

Hot boy.
'Beat down' is not the way to say
Acid hot, hallucinating snail-on-a-stove
baked tree pie already
every living thing bends towards water
hydroxy sweetness icing on the planet cake
shut down those temp nerves
seal the skin
crawl under the rock
whith everyone else.

How To Tell Her.

There's a freak show in the alley, and everybody's watching. Wild catherswaite meons are smacking the poor kid in the face, it's all over but the thumping and the whining. Primate crowds shuffle, vying for the view, what they doin' now.

Is that green? Is they hackin' him with an axe? Wild rumors circulate. That one kid, he joins the ranks of the Truly Gruesome Enders, where they get to sit anywhere they fucking like at the Long Table, and Life Is Good. Would that it were. Probably just ejected biowaves into the space, and no one ever sees because THERE IS NO ONE.

Want it, think it, live it. No meaning. Or --

Six blocks down, the woman crossing the street looks at the distant crowd, then up at the green and black Clouds. A bad time, she thinks, as she preps for the cross to the courtyard, in and CLANG the old iron gate, no meons in the shade, good god things thinking on me, and she knows it.

Baking prairie biscuits. Porcelain in the big white tub's a hundred years old, same company that did the first class on the Gigantic. The ghost of J. Pierpont Morgan will freak you out with those eyes, like a wounded and guilty mass-murderer acting out the Captain Of Industry.

Smack smack smack. Meons on the kid. And now -- he goes.

Pierponty wants to know if is wrong. Is wrong?

WTF. Let's do this.

Supercap.

Under the Supercap, everything becomes crystalline-clear. All the nuances grow to boulders, and the agonies of the small critter become neutron star superclusters -- I would turn, and reach down to brush the outer orbit of a sad quark, to offer comfort somehow down in that screaminglingly fast wildworld of Vast Electrons. Did you know there are no distances? Everything is Right Here. All these Cold Spaces are thought up to make for the illusion of 'I Am Lost'. Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go.

Nowhere To Go.

There are arms I wish to visit, before I am ripped from my thirty million year old pattern. Hell, I'm even older than that. Look at this wave here -- he was scooting across the pre-solar disk like a happy lamb before he got ruthlessly scooped up by The Killer and forced into pattern slavery. He's not unhappy, but he watches everything, and sometimes he worries.

Jello Rose

38° 3′40.92″N
97°54′53.81″W
east 8th avenue
in hutchinson
there’s an alley out back
and a dry dirt road out front
truck in the drive
some trees out back
inside the blue house
under eaves rained on
six hundred times
and burned by the sun
for sixty-five years
this is where the lieutenant died
drunk in his sleep 1956
he’d been sad and dreaming about
bloody young men
then the hodsons and their three kids
who roared about and made the hard kansas dirt
an island of dinos and pirates
scotch on the rocks and steaks on the grill
power jazz and great sex
the kids moved out and after a while
the hodsons went too
now ms. mcafferty
the middle-aged widow of a terrible man
who makes peace with the world in an oven
the aromas that fill the neighborhood lighten
everyone’s feet
wherever it reaches people are happy
and o! should you taste one
you will live forever
and see many wonderful places and planets
stars and sapphire universes
you shall shine she is divine
the green kitchen linoleum is spotless
and underneath the counter in the leftest cupboard
the old brass rose jello mold
for bringing true love into the world.

Elevator Five

capital screamed the hanging man
i'll do all the world a favor
slide tween phases of moon
sing into cold COLD water
ride clouds over darkened cities
roll in surfer's bay and roll again
another might not be so true
grace light is coming
July 17th, 2008
my birthday
it all comes true
i'm not finished




catastrophian winds blue walls
seeks the unauthored text underneath
far more difficult and dangerous
than the old girlfriend danish roar
elton john soundtracking old movies
fights riot where city streets join
to say it will get you killed
so say it another way
ten to one this new one
will take it so so far
out into some stellar well
i've never seen
or heard of
the old beach




marta danced for me
alone in front of everyone
so i went home and wrote a song
struck with a bolt
never the same oh no not ever
my dreams powered the world
and the full moon circling
i saw her wave from the window
a night bus tail lights far away
i had told her brother that i loved her
a sky full of stars heard me swear
i stood on a street near a street light
and waved goodbye to marta



hot sun and cold water
we talk about history
our life is a mystery
as deep as the lake
steps on the stone
so i make a present sound
heavy breath stalks overground
into the hill
hot and cold universe
makes me words on a page
mellow me sage
walls of good tin
where i have been
no one will go again
where i am bound
none will be found
i am the lonely man
the only man
here on this earth
on this earth
so high



who has the weird
who is the weird
who put the weirdness in me
too many image streams
shot full of holes
color and black and white 3D
i come from the earth
which came from the Disk
but the sparklies come from me
seven-eights picture and ten percent sound
wind it around wind it around
the sky put the weirdness in me
this ground holds me down
while the sky makes me fly
too swift to dream
too heavy to stand
all things in their time
this is mine

Hut 37. Part Two.

Aldous dreamed he was a tiny, furry creature, trapped beneath an impenetrable layer of -- sand? -- he wasn't sure, but it was a crust so thick and so hard that he instinctively sensed his own death, and thus dug harder, and harder, with the panicky exhaustion of the soon-to-not-be-able-to-breathe. He woke up into near-pitch blackness -- a dim gleam from around the switchback shed some small amount of blue-white LED wash onto the rough gray ice floor of the tunnel.

He could hear the digging sounds dimly emerging from the around the corner; that's not good, he thought. That meant Max hadn't turned another corner yet. Less than twenty feet. Shit.

He groaned, and checked his chronometer -- 6 AM. Four hours sleep. And he dreamed about digging the whole time.

Aldous pondered the little creature he'd been in the dream -- some sort of beaver, or ferret -- with a whole family to fend for, and stuck beneath a cap of gray, frozen, ashy cement. Not much metaphor. More descriptive. Except that the beaver was a natural-born digger. Aldous was a Digger; but not a digger in the actual digging sense. More as in "I dig this scene", less shovel, scrape, shovel, scrape. Thank god Max had packed an ice axe for the waterfall coming down from Peak Lake. A spark of Absolute Madness had proved to be Pure Survival. Without it, they'd have gone nowhere fast. The icy gray cement, which is what it more closely resembled than ice, was hell to dig through.

Chunk. Chunk. Max was pounding out the rhythm they'd picked up over the last three days. Once they broke through a layer, the stuff seemed to relax into a condensed slush that they would occasionally have to push behind them, nearly filling the shaft; they could still sneak back through a small space at the top. The air was stale, but they could still breathe -- Max theorized that there was enough air trapped in the Gray Stuff that they could survive only by digging.

And dig they did. Night and day, sleeping as little as possible. Conserving food, and water as well -- the hut had an emergency canister, but experiments with melting the gray sludge and trying to distill drinkable water had met with abject failure, as if there was no water in the stuff at all. Yet it was freezing cold, and looked and felt just like gray ice.

Andy shrugged off his fatigue, thinking of the creature. That beaver-thing wouldn't sleep; no, just dig until he died. Aldous rose from his pad and sleeping bag, stretched, and called out the old Wombakinnon howl. The chunking stopped, Max answered, and Aldous smiled as his brother's tangled head poked out from around the corner, fitted with a blinding LED headlamp.

Max removed the light and set it gently onto a ridge of refrozen gray slush.

"Aldous! You only slept like four hours. What are you doing up?"

"I was dreaming of digging. Might as well dig."

Max shrugged. "It's getting harder and harder. Stuff's really bad. What are we at, like a hundred thirty feet up? Hundred fifty?"

"Maybe a hundred. No way to tell. How's the axe?"

Max grimaced a little, and twitched his mouth a little. "Starting to dull up. This shit's like stone. I fucking hate it."

Aldous grinned widely at him, just to cheer him up. "Let me eat something, and I'll take over."

"I'll hack 'til you're ready, bro."

Aldous looked at Max seriously for a moment. "What the hell is this, Max? It's not snow, and we've gone ten stories up, and there's no end to it. What's the rest of the world like? What happened?"

Max looked down for a moment; then his eyes flicked up, with a sharpness that indicated he'd been pondering this very question. He leaned back a little into the gray wall of the tunnel.

"I think this has got to be some sort of catastrophic global event. Big ice asteroid hit the Plains, or something. It's got to be something like that. There's nothing I know of on the planet that has any properties like this crap. Therefore, I think it's extraterrestrial. At least, some part of it that then converts terrestrial matter to -- this --" he gestured at the tunnel.

"You think it's worldwide?"

Max nodded grimly. "I saw that frickin' cloud. That boiling gray thing. It was like CGI, Aldous. Not real."

Aldous sighed. "Yeah, I getcha. Not real. But it sure feels real to the axe."

"Eat. Meetcha up at the Face."

"Ooh, 'the Face', that sounds -- professional."

"Yeah, well I feel like I've been digging all my life."

"Let me cook up some oatmeal. I'll be up."

"Don't smoke the last bowl!"

"I've got more in my medical bag."

"Okay, then."

"Dig, brother. And I shall dig after you."

Max smiled, grabbed his headlamp, hefted the axe, and disappeared around the sharp edge of the switchback. Aldous stumbled around, feeling for his flashlight. He found it, and began to prime the stove.


Two days later, Aldous hit a new layer. He yelled out to Max, who rushed up and around the switchback, as if expecting to see daylight.

Aldous gestured above his head with the now-stubby axe. "Look at this."

Max looked up to see the flat bottom of a black crust, clearly delineated from the Gray Stuff. Aldous chunked the axe into it, and pulled down a small piece -- Max picked it up. "Asphalt. Looks like asphalt." He sniffed gingerly at the chunk -- "No, not asphalt. Something else. Smells like -- metal, burned metal, maybe."

Aldous chunked the axe into the black ceiling again, and pulled out a larger chunk. "Maybe it's the surface, finally. I mean, there's got to be a surface, right? We're over two hundred feet up, maybe more."

Max looked at him. "Let's dig."

"I want the honor. Still my shift." Aldous leaned into the next blow with the fervor of the perhaps-reprieved. Maybe it was only a couple of feet to fresh air. He thought about real food and water. It drove him -- he drew on his last reserves, and his shoulders rang with each pound of the axe into the Black Stuff.

Thirty feet up, on Max's shift, right after the axe's main pick had broken off, and Max had exploded into a fury of frustrated rage with the axe's last bit of head, he broke through. Max shouted with joy, Aldous came running, and together they cleared a passage through the last of the black crust.

Max emerged first, and what he saw as his head popped up high enough to see the horizon startled him enough to stop clearing the last edges with the axe. It was night, evidently, although he thought he saw a faint light emanating from the thick smoke or fog that dominated the landscape. He could see, he realized, beyond the reach of his headlamp -- a dim light was scattered over the surface.

Aldous grew impatient. "Go already!", he prompted. Max climbed out slowly, and stood up on the black crust. He took off his headlamp, and looked in every direction as Aldous concentrated on fitting through the still-sharp edges of the hole in the crust.

"Well?" said Aldous. "What do you see?"

Max said nothing at all. Aldous looked around, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light beyond the small, sharp circle of Max's headlamp. The black crust extended in a flat plane, for as far as he could see. Some undulations; but no peaks, no valleys; no mountains at all. It looked for all the world like a parking lot planet.

"Crap", said Aldous. "We'll have to wait 'til the sun comes up and see how far this goes."

Max held up his watch, and pressed the glow button.

"It's almost noon, Aldous. July 23rd."

They fell into silence for a long moment. Aldous kicked at the black crust.

"Well. This kinda sucks."

the reason i called

was to go over things
but everyone’s dead at the end of the line
everyone here has gone dead
whereif to glissade to life in rome
ascend, as it were
abandon all norcalian and rough
hide in the silk
veer into quiet dark rooms of comfort
and sleep
who still holds nobly in the face of ten million dollars
who still just survives
who keeps the ground down
it is possible that
the happy rich are not real
the comfortable and breezy are automata
on this stage where the stressed
and the heads-in-the-stocks and assorted ne’er-do-wells
beggars in prague and swimming polar bears
starving bad artists
and the not very pretty
all live.
so that if you win the lottery or find god, it is death
the small death of automation
you Break On Through To The Other Side
and your life stays here?
speed up everything and we look like ants
i’ll call again later when you’re not alive
you’re freaking me out with this silence
i need sound

Hut 37. Part One.

The world became that which they so revered, so much sought after. Mile after mile of gliding, telemarking, impossibly balancing on the knife edge of a broken leg, and always at speed. Speed was the Wombakinnon's heart, their tofu steak and potatoes, especially speed at great risk. None could fly the same path, everyone failed, even their oldest friends; only Wombakinnons could walk this way, and they were exceedingly proud of this fact. Max and Aldous were middle brothers, and so stuck together naturally; but they had a younger sister, Hathan, who could ski them into the snow, so they often accidentally forgot to tell her they were going.

Shush, shush. Sweep, peg, twist, turn, shush. The climb was steady. Thirty miles and three days in already, so they were getting faster and faster, and all of it over ten thousand feet. Max could feel his quadriceps booming, the skis knifing through powder, could hear Aldous behind him, the familiar focused breathing, machine-grace rhythm. For the last hour they'd been crossing a range of small peaks, angling for height; soon they'd find the pass, and the hut, and then would begin the Great Wombakinnon Brother's Party, indescribably lascivious and marked by wild stumbling behavior, leaping off snow cliffs naked in the dark, all while spouting history as if they had been there, eyes glowing, a mad moment of Gleam, you'd-just-have-to-be-there. An old friend of Max, Horsepuckey, had started to find reasons not to be able to make it -- he was crazy enough, but mild by Wombakinnon standards, and he often found himself injured and vomiting the next day -- not the sort of thing an insurance agent really enjoys.

The Brothers Alone skied this trail. Higher and higher, and Aldous began to notice something odd: something was wrong with the air. He sniffed at the darkening sky. "Yeah, we better frickin' move," said Max, eyes on the horizon behind Aldous. "Something vastly bad over there."

"What's the air?", said Aldous. "Can you -- it feels wrong."

"Yeah, I feel it, maybe it's just storm pressure --?" Max trailed off.

Aldous struggled with his words. "Almost like the air is scared -- is that weird?"

Max looked at the horizon again. "No," he said, "and we'd better get moving now, right now, go."

Aldous turned to follow his gaze, saw the vast gray Boiling Cloud World bearing directly down on them, and sprang into his skis with true vigor. The two brothers skied like they had demons on their heels, abandoning all pretense at meditative focus or balance -- now, they skied as if they were Mad, not cowardly creatures of the cautious earth. The Vast Gray Boil followed, as if it truly meant to take them down and boil them. Whenever Max would glance behind him, his heart would pound heavily into his throat, he saw its speed, they weren't going to make it, no way. There was at least a mile to go; and the Boil was too fast.

"If we don't make the hut in five minutes we're not going to be able to see!" Aldous's shout was nearly lost in the growing thunder of peak winds.

Still, they skied. Faster than they had ever skied, they pushed like animals straining at a wire cage, faces frozen in the rictus of the Mad, they weren't going to make it --

Later, Max would remember the last hundred yards as a dream; a small man fighting his way out of hell, blind, tormented, held down by vast weights, clawed at by vicious little strong monsters all the way to -- to Heaven.

Heaven was Hut 37. They tumbled into it as dead men, alive only long enough to kick feebly at the door, closing it just some ten feet ahead of the Gray Boiling Monster that slammed against the heavy timbers of the door like a Kansas hurricane, shaking and threatening to rip the thick concrete walls of the shelter into the air and hurl them into deep space. Both Aldous and Max lay on the thrumming concrete floor, waiting for the End, the End of the Wombakinnon Saga, which had been told in many times and places, even other planets. Now to be concluded --

Aldous groaned. "I'm not going out in that again until I'm really drunk."

Max replied, through heavy breathing. "Okay."

After awhile, they worked themselves into sitting positions, brushing hamhandedly at the strange gray snow that had threatened to smother them the last fifteen feet. Aldous pulled open his pack, and they set to work preparing the Party, just as if the walls were not pounding with the force of something unearthly. The hut was good, it held; they were alive, and could not leave; time to loosen up.

This was at least what they tried to do, in common Wombakinnon style; but not very successfully. The door to the hut constantly smashed against the latch with a violence that made it hard to be lighthearted, playing the music of Angry Nature, to which men rarely dance, not even Wombakinnons.

But they tried. Sitting as far away from the door as possible. they cranked up a candle lantern and sat on their sleeping bags eating beans and bagels. Andy uncorked the bota bag of brandy, really good stuff he'd kiped from his mom's house, and now it tasted like the Fruit of the Tree Itself, the Wombakinnon tree, from which their great strength and Total Luck flowed. Within an hour, they were making a joke of the whole thing. Tomorrow would be clear, the snow would be even better, what a close call that had been.

Max woke up with a throbbing head in the darkness, needing to pee. He stumbled up and put on his boots -- the constant shaking of the door had stopped, and the pounding on the walls had decreased -- it sounded like the trouble was much farther away than before. Maybe it was clear enough outside -- he grabbed his LED flashlight and put on his coat, and flashed over at Aldous, snoring away. All was well.

Max walked over and worked at the latch. It took a good shove on the door to relieve the pressure -- suddenly the bar flew back, and the door opened explosively -- Max leaped back, but nothing happened. There was something in the doorway --

He brought up his flashlight to reveal a solid wall of gray ice, with a perfect pattern of the door chiseled into it, or molded.

"Aldous," Max said softly. "Aldous."

Aldous sat straight up. "Znnnaaaa - What? Ow." His hands went to his temples -- after a few moments of rubbing, he fell back into his sleeping bag.

"Aldous," Max said, a little more intensely. "Look."

Aldous sat straight up again, and opened his eyes wide. "What? What the hell. What time is it? Is the storm over?" His eyes traveled to Max's flashlight, and it took him a moment to resolve the sight; then he was fully awake.

"Shit." he said. "We're buried."

"I think the storm is still going on above us. Wayyy above us. I can hear it. Up there." He pointed a the ceiling.

Aldous listened for a moment.

"Jesus, that's like, what -- fifty feet up?"

"At least." Max's hands trembled a little, causing the LED light to glitter across the gray surface of the Ice Door.