None But Eagles

Could Look Him In The Face

  • 4th
  • January
  • 2012

A vague chill fog

ampersunder:

We were still a little drunk on New Year’s morning while preparing for our next assignment, so the schematics were a more accurate reflection of the bottles we had emptied and the glasses we had broken over the holidays than of the route by which we planned to carry out our task.

We arrived at the wrong end of the industrial complex, where centuries of air pollution had created a unique weather system separate from the rest of the city. It was absurdly hot and sunny; our heads steamed as we carried our parkas rolled up on our backs with the rest of the gear and took shallow, measured breaths. We walked for hours, days perhaps, before the real atmosphere came into sight, a vague chill fog in the distance beyond the relentless sunbeams.

The weather had been calm when we left the hotel, but as we emerged into winter zipping up our coats, a snow squall hit us full in our faces and we bent over backwards trying to stay upright. We pushed toward the nearest building and took refuge in a doorway.

The door had no handle. It originally served as an emergency exit only until they realized during the first evacuation that the door opened in the wrong direction. There was a sign hung too high for any of us to read, its message scratched and faded.

We gathered close together on the threshold, shrinking back from the reach of the wind. We kept our arms stiff at our sides, pretending nonchalance. The closeness of the space slowly warmed us, but we couldn’t look at each other’s faces. We turned our eyes outwards to watch the storm, but we leaned hard against the door and not each other.

Someone opened the door from the inside and we toppled to the ground at her feet in a heap. She held an empty coffee cup in one hand and gazed at us from behind thick glasses with her tiny black eyes like a mouse’s. 

“Whoops,” she said, “wrong way,” and tried to close the door. But our bodies were in the way, piled on the ground, half-inside, half-outside, links of sausage coming unstuffed. She let go of the door and it swung away from us. She retreated into the darkness, wheezing or whistling, we weren’t sure which. We exchanged looks and scrambled to our feet and went inside.

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