The sun peeks over the eastern mountain wall, apparently still deciding if it wants to get up today at all. The traveler marks the occasion by carving a tally on his arm with the fountain pen from his pocket. It’s the eighth tally since leaving the wreck and the third since his pen stopped working, the ink bottled up in the cold metal, preserved cryogenically, waiting to be unfrozen on the other side of the valley.
As he trudges on, the wind stalks him like a winter wolf, always behind him, howling and barking, nipping and biting at those parts left exposed by his now-tattered three-piece and top hat. Its icy maw smells of pine needles and upturned earth and grins in a grim promise of death. As it whistles through the mountain pass, a scavenger-bird, starved by winter, is swallowed up, cawing in distress, fluttering and flapping, and leavesbehind only a scattering of footprints: a set of alphabet magnets, all the letter Y, stuck to a white refrigerator wasteland.
By this point, the traveler is a clown, white-faced and red-cheeked, scuffling his feet in sad physical comedy. As another gust blows past, he raises his full-size umbrella to block the stirred-up snow from entering his eyes. He tires and pants heavily. With every gasping breath the bitter breeze burrows deeper and deeper into his throat and lungs, looking for some place warm to curl up and hibernate. It filling his mouth with taste of ice and snow, a cold sweetness to mix with the salty snot that runs down from his frost-bitten nose. His steps become smaller, his legs stiffened by the cold. Each is slow and deliberate, requiring more effort than the one prior, and sounds like an apple being bitten by horse. After harnessing every throe of hidden strength, when his strides become so small that they take him no further, he crumples into a heap, collecting himself in the fetal position below his black umbrella. Wavering in and out of consciousness, he hallucinates.
The umbrella above him grows larger and larger until becoming an overhang of dark obsidian, wet and barnacle-blasted by the grape-shot-cannon tide. He is an alcove on the ocean shore, only accessible when the water is low, carved out by eons of waves crashing against it. Splashes of water fall on seaweed-covered rocks sending cool ocean spray over his back. Gulls call out like children in a game of tag carried by an ocean breeze that chills the droplets of water that cling to his naked body. He shivers and looks into the cloudless sky at the birds circling above him, carried by the wind…
