Thus the Cold Comes

Photo by plastictaxi

A record player hums softly in the background of the dark room, the whispered tones of Sinatra filling in the dusty corners. A solitary candle sits glowing on the table in the center of the room, the flickering light illuminating the wrinkled crevasses of the old woman’s face. Ms. Bockner sits in her wheelchair at the table reminiscing of times gone past. She was once a powerful woman, the CEO of a successful company. That was all gone now. Lost to the winter winds, the result of an ill-considered business deal. She now sits alone. She sits apart from humanity and blames it for her fate.

The house was left to her by business partner and husband (another ill-considered deal). He was good enough, she supposed, satisfactory. As the candlelight begins to dim she retires to her bedroom. An uneaten loaf of bread left sitting on the table as the candle flickers out. Outside the cold winter winds drift along the walls of the house, scraping the leaves along the pavement.

Footsteps on the pavement break through the silent din of the night. First growing louder and then fading away again into the darkness. Humanity didn’t much care for her either. Her relatives either gone or far away, she took to every day the same. Following the same tracks in the floorboards, worn in by time and made permanent by monotony.

More footsteps, they approach, scratching along the pavement as they run. Then silence, a bang. The hinges and locks strain to withhold the door from opening but fail as the old door swings inward, knocking against the wall and jarring the paintings hung in the hallway entrance. Ms. Bockner rises as the doors along the hallway open and close, shaking the fragile house. Her bedroom door unlatches.

A young man of about 25 stumbles through.

“Who are you?” she says sternly.

“None of your business, lady,” he mumbles, clamoring for the lock on the door.

“You have no right to be here. I demand that you leave immediately.”

“I have just as much right to be here as anywhere else in this godforsaken land.”

He latches the door.

“Why are you here?” she demands.

“You wanna know why I’m here?” he points to the window, “That’s why. In my world you live on the whim of the breeze. There is no inside or outside, only the wind and its torture.”

He starts towards her but freezes mid-step. Her grey, weathered eyes are fixated squarely on his. He looks away, as if to protect his soul from hers. He walks over to the window overlooking the street outside, watching the leaves with an intensity as much as hers watching him.

“I’m taking control. That’s all you need to know,” he says finally. She sees something in him; he is cold, worn.

“What shall I call you?” she asks calmly and with a presence befitting her heritage.

“My name is Rodger. No more, no less,” he says as he backs out of the room, “Simply, Rodger.”

The next morning she awakes again to a banging sound. She fixates herself in her wheelchair and rides the worn-in grooves to the kitchen. Rodger is there, hammering nails haphazardly into the windows. Two hits on one, three on another, not even bothering to finish one before adding the next. There’s an urgency about him. An almost frantic calling moving him.

“Can’t let the wind in,” he mutters to himself.

“This is still my house. I shall let any wind in that I want. In fact, I rather like the wind, its chill reminds me that I’m not dead yet.” she retorts.

Taken aback by her ignorance almost as much as by her insolence he turns around to confront her, her eyes.

“There’s a storm coming, the kind of storm that wicks from your soul and removes you.” he says, trying to ignore her deathly stare.

“I don’t imagine I have much soul left to remove. You will leave them open.”

“No!” he snaps, but then recovers, “No, you may have signed your death wish already but I’ve got life in me yet, and I intend to keep it that way.”

“You picked the wrong house to hide in then,” she says, duly noting each and every crack and hole in the walls.

The cold air permeates through every crevice in the house. Its ever-present chill weakening its very fibers. He ignores her and continues on with his hammering, “Suit yourself, if you want to spend you life hammering down windows, be my guest,” she concedes. She situates herself at the table in the kitchen, the uneaten loaf of bread still sitting on the table, waiting for its day. Ms. Bockner studies the loaf, following its grooves and mounds like a palm reader judging its lifeline. Not much left.

The days are growing shorter. The leaves are gone now and an awkward silence falls over the street at night. The pavements bare, and the wind now passes unheeded over the concrete sidewalk. The windows of the house are locked down, the number of nails in them almost out-numbering the amount of fibers in the wood and they creek with the pain of a life not lived.

Inside, Rodger sleeps on the floor of the guest room, a desolate room without any furniture, but also one without windows. Meanwhile Ms. Bockner sits still at the kitchen table. She likes to greet the night, it has become her blind companion. The solitary candle sits with her, still flickering in the pale white light of the crescent winter moon. While the loaf of bread marks the passage of time gone unnoticed.

As the candle continues eating away at its source, growing dimmer, Ms. Bockner sits quiet with a serenity unmatched by even the night itself, absorbing the dulcet tones of the vinyl as they surround her in a desperate attempt to fill the room.

The candle soon grows near its end, another victim of time, as the north wind, no longer hindered by the comforts of life, begins to permeate through the room. First through the kitchen, it enters through the wall, seeping in through the cracks, dominating the house. It seeps under the floorboards, filling in the grooves that were worn in. It seeps through the doors and into each room as one by one it dims their core. It seeps through the windows, past the nails, and out again into the night. It freezes the time, the time seen to pass inside this house, and stops the future as it leaves. It is thus the cold comes.

A story I wrote for class, based on the Finnish legend of Kullerwoinen.

Photo by roberthuffstutter

Kalen was cursed. He was cursed since birth. He was cursed in everything he did. Or at least that the way he would tell it. In reality, Kalen was a blue-collar worker living in New York. 25-years-old, barely having finished high school and still living with his parents, you could say he was a bit of a late-bloomer. Or he could just be “slow.” In any case, he was plagued with incredibly bad luck. Ever since he was a baby he could never seem to do anything right. He was born prematurely, a breech birth, and almost died in the action. His mother was young. Too young to have a baby, and too righteous to have an abortion (or so her parents said), and thus the baby was given up for adoption.

He was adopted by a kind couple from Buffalo, where he lived an uneventful and similarly unsuccessful childhood. A ‘C-‘ student, he skated through, and in school. And despite losing many-a-skateboard to the principal, he managed to pass through elementary and junior-high school. Then on July 7, 1977, his birthday, a knock came at his adoptive parents door. It was his mother. Older, not necessarily wiser, but just as caring and devoted as before. She pleaded for the return of her son. He was 14 now and preparing to enter high school. His adoptive parents left the decision up to him, and he decided to return to his birth mother. She still lived in New York, but now had a husband, another son, and a daughter.

He eventually found a job as a construction worker. It was here where his life went from merely unsuccessful to “cursed.” He had been working at the construction site for 7 months time. He was a crane worker and they were placing the beams for the next floor. He began to lower the beam carefully onto the structure. – The cable snapped. The beam fell. Two were killed.

He always had blamed himself for this, for not double or triple checking the cable, for not swinging the beam away before it fell, for not saving their lives. He held himself responsible for the deaths of his friends. He worked at the site for only 2 weeks more. He could not overcome his guilt .

It was now 3 years and 4 months later and Kalen had gotten a job as a miner. Going into a more dangerous profession perhaps as repentance for his grief over the crane incident, perhaps as a way to punish himself. The miners were setting dynamite, preparing to blast the tunnel onwards, wiring the explosives in neat order. Kalen, the blast director, shot the charge off. The rocks crumpled under the weight of the explosion, falling and filling the tunnel. A perfect blast.

Kalen and the others went to admire their work. They approached the rubble and began to remove it. – A second blast. Unexploded TNT. Five were killed. Kalen was standing behind one of the other miners, a friend of his, who took the shrapnel, and now lay motionless on top of him. He quit two weeks later, citing emotional stress.

Now growing bitter and jaded from his constant misfortune he packed his bags and traveled to California, figuring he had nothing left to lose, a dangerous thing in such a desperate person.

Hoping to start anew he got a job pushing papers at a corporation in Silicon Valley, land of the golden microchip. He figured he couldn’t possibly cause any damage here. He made his life in California. Quickly climbing the ranks of the company ladder. He was wise to get in when he did; he made his fortunes here.

He had every Saturday off and it became his ritual to drive to drive south to spend his earnings at the casinos. Why not? He was rich. Life was good. What did he have to lose?

It was on a Saturday the raid happened. The CEO was arrested as the leader of a money-laundering scheme. Kalen’s money was never real. He was left with $1,000.

Disheartened and angry at the world, finding himself cursed with this strange affliction of bad luck, he went to a local bar to drown his sorrows. He stayed there for hours. Drinking and contemplating the world, his history, as his vision got blurrier. He spent his money, losing himself in the warmth of the bar. Closing time. He leaves. Following the kaleidoscope of lights down the street to his house.

On the way he crosses paths with a girl, she catches his eye and he approaches her. Fumbling in his drunken stupor, he tries to get her to come home with him. She refuses and pushes him away and runs down the street. He spies another girl, another chance, he tries, she escapes. Finally another, she too refuses, he has had enough: enough of the world, enough of his luck, enough of himself. He grabs her and pulls her down an alley. He offers her all the money he has left, $920.52. His fortune for one more night of pleasure. Fearful of her life, she accepts.

The next morning, in bed, she asks him where he is from, New York, the same. She asks him where he lived. The answer stops her: the same. His sister. She tells him. Stunned. She says she needs to be alone. She lays herself on the kitchen floor.

A fugitive, he has turned against the world, as the world has turned against him. He returns to his home, to New York.

His mother, shocked. Her daughter, gone. Not wanting to lose another child she pleads with him to flee. To flee to the Midwest, to flee from his life. He obliges, reluctantly.

He moves to North Dakota. He is there not 1 month before DNA results come back in California and he is arrested for the rape of his sister. He spends the next 6 years in a California prison, forced everyday to realize how dismal his life had become, and to ponder why he was chosen to have this misery brought upon him.

Prison sentence done, he returns to New York. He has made a decision. He tells his mother he is going to join the army, to fight in the war, it’s where he belongs. His mother begs him not to go. Who would take care of her and his father and his brother? “You can go to the nursing home if need-be, they will take care of you,” he says. He then asks his father and brother if they would care if he died. They refuse, they’ll find another, more worthy. He then asks his mother. She will always care about him, no matter what happens, and she would mourn him if he died.

War. Far away from home, far away from reason, far away from the luck he left behind. He is victorious in battles, perhaps found his niche, found his niche in killing people. He concluded if he was destined to have the people around him die, that he would be in control, he would be the killer. He received the medal of honor. The war over, he returns home.

Nothing. There is no one to greet him, no one to welcome him, no one to congratulate him. He returns to his home. It is empty. There were riots. His family is gone. He walks slowly around his house, touching the cold stove, feeling the cold hearth, contemplating his fate. He concludes, perhaps it was not that he was not that he was destined to have those around him die, but that he was never meant to have lived. He joins his family. It is 2-14. He was 43.

            He sits at his computer, in his silent room, the only noise and light, from the wind blowing through the trees and the afternoon sun shining in through the window. Click-click-click, ssssh. 

            The breeze meanders through the woods as he is thinking he would rather be outside than working. The quiet hum of a truck engine starts and grows louder from outside of the window, the wheels rubbing rocks together on the pavement. It’s a black truck, and quieter than it ought to be. Almost more like a tank than a truck it has no windows and only a single door. He notices the sound and watches out the window next to his desk as the truck pulls up in front of his house.  It stops in the middle of the street. It’s just sitting there, humming, waiting, like a tiger about to strike. After a few moments, the singular door clicks open, and masked figures donning only black begin to pour out.  They vanish around the side and under the overhang of the house.

            He begins to back away from the window, concerned and confused as to why his house is suddenly surrounded by these masked ghost-like figures. When suddenly he hears clanging on the screens in the windows. Clanging from metal-on-metal. His windows are now being bombarded by small fragments of black iron, flying up, hitting, and falling back down again. He rushes out of his room, down the hallway and into the living room, hoping to distance himself from the persistent clanging on the windows.

            Meanwhile outside, a car is speeding up the street. It’s loud and old and also shrouded in black. One of those muscle cars from the 1960s. It speeds up to the house and swerves to right into the driveway and down the side of the house. He cannot see it but he follows its path with his ears. The car runs down into the yard at the side of the house and swerves again to the right, crashing onto the porch under the sunroom. The sunroom is attached to the living room and he sees it shake as the car pounds its foundations. The whole house shakes. The clanging from the metal on the window-screens continues on in the background; while footsteps are heard running across the roof, and a zip as steel ropes suddenly fall down to the ground in front of the house. More clanging, the back windows now being hit by the same strange fragments as the front. He glances into the kitchen as through the windows he catches the mysterious figures flying down from the roof onto the ropes.

            A bang on the outside wall of the sunroom, he sees one of the figures climbing up the wall and latching onto the window with insect-like precision. He runs to get the phone to call for help but as he is dialing the window bursts open and he turns to see a tall masked figure of about 6 feet high in front of him. He reaches for the only mobile and reasonably solid object close to him, a shoe sitting on a cabinet outside of the entrance to the sunroom where the figure is now standing. The figure is yelling in a foreign language of the Germanic sort, possibly Swedish or Icelandic. The man takes a swing at the figure with the shoe, still holding the phone in the other hand. The figure clasps the man’s wrist as it flies past its face. Holding on, it squeezes his wrist causing the shoe to drop to the floor. The room begins to warp, the walls bending under the weight of the room knocked off its foundations. 

            Slowly the sunroom begins to break away from the house and the figure disappears downward releasing the man who falls backwards onto the living room floor. Crash, the sunroom lies in rubble on top of the black muscle car, the engine still sputtering.  A rain of figures then flies down from the roof, picking up their comrade and disappearing around the corner of the house and into their black tank. The tank speeds backwards down the single-lane street and a vague silence returns to the house, the wind now blowing cool through the hole living room instead of the windows.

            He glances around; absorbing what has just come to pass. Walking cautiously back to his room he looks around to see nothing out of place. The ropes are gone and there is only the sound of the wind in the trees and the hum of his computer in the background.

            He leaves his room and runs down the stairs and out the front door. Stunned, he again finds nothing out of place, no evidence the figures had ever been there, no iron fragments and no ropes, not even a footprint in the grass. He walks around to the back of the house, needing to see the sunroom to confirm himself sane. To his confused relief the sunroom still lies in rubble in the backyard, but every trace of the black car that caused the incident is now gone.

            He stands alone in his backyard, amidst the remains of his house. The cool breeze now a comforting reminder of reality as he begins to pick up the bits of wood that once were his.

End.

“One must never despair upon losing something, whether it is an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. What has to decline, declines; what belongs to us, stays with us, for everything works according to laws that are greater than our capacity for understanding and that only seem to contradict us. You have to live within yourself and think of ALL of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost.” 

A true story I wrote for my Concept and Story class.

            Another day, another show to produce. Kevin arrives at school and sits down in the control room to begin parsing the typical flood of morning announcement e-mails into a news script. He begins cutting and pasting them into the script, but one of them caught his eye:

“Sorry to hear about what happened, Billy will be missed.”

“What happened?” It couldn’t be the same Billy he knew, he thought. He continued on with his job, sorting e-mails, trying to ignore what he was thinking. Then an e-mail from an administrator came, explaining the current situation. It was clear. His friend was gone. Incomprehensible, he had seen him just yesterday, but it was true. One of his best friends had died in a car accident early that morning, just 5 hours earlier. Kevin remembered he was looking out his bedroom window around that time, watching the rain and enjoying the cool night breeze. It was a terrible night to be driving; it was raining, and the fog was thicker than he had ever seen before. Billy was on his way home from his girlfriend’s house. She was the last one to see him.

This information was still confidential, supposed to be known only to teachers and administrators. He wasn’t sure what to do now. Should he just continue going about his work? Acting as if nothing was wrong? He decided he had to do something, at least tell someone. Just then, his friend Nikki came in the room. He can’t tell her though. She asks for help with her video project. He tries to answer her question but not reveal how upset he’s starting to become. Finally she leaves and he can relax to gather his thoughts for a second. They had done special announcements when a student had died before, but it was never while he was in charge, and never someone he knew.

Finally, the other crewmembers begin to show up. He asks his friend and assistant Pietro if he had heard what had happened. He hadn’t and he tells him, releasing the burden of feeling like the only one who knew.

The knowledge gradually begins to spread through the crew. As first period wore on one of the teacher pulls aside the few students who knew and she tells them not to tell anyone else until the principal and guidance counselor gets there. It’s too late for that anyway. People begin to gather together in the theatre and the principal and guidance counselor arrive to talk to the students.

Billy had graduated a year earlier from the tech theatre magnet and still stopped by often to help out with the shows. Everybody knew him.

Eventually, Kevin goes in with the other students in the theatre, the whole theatre department is there, everyone is signing a big sign as an impromptu memorial. Out in the hallway the art students are doing the same. He hangs around for a bit, talking to friends, but he really doesn’t much feel like being around other people so he heads back to the studio control room.

By then it became clear that there weren’t to be the usual televised announcements that day, but they still have to be done. He finishes the script and the announcements are performed audio-only over the intercom. There was to be no mention of Billy’s death in the announcements then and the announcers struggle to keep their composure.

The announcements and his daily obligations over with, Kevin begins to think of what to do next. A memorial of his own…

Not really knowing why, and not looking for anything in particular, he begins to dig through the televideo class archives looking for anything footage there may be of Billy. He spends the rest of the school day going through every last tape. An archivist at heart, any sort of tragedy seems to compel him to obsessively begin collecting any relevant data at the time. In addition to all of the videotapes, he also collects the e-mails the teachers had sent around offering their condolences. Gradually the idea of a memorial video begins to come together, and he takes the videos home to assemble.

Browsing through his iTunes playlists he finds the songs to accompany the video. As he begins to capture and edit the video the emotions of the day finally catch up to him, he had been trying to fend them off, but they all come out at once in a sudden outpouring of tears. He works through his grief and tears struggling at times to continue facing the fact that his friend, who is right in front of him, no longer exists. But he perseveres, wanting to complete the video in time for the viewing and funeral. He works for 14 hours straight to complete the video, and finishes it in a single night.

He brings the video to school the next day. Everybody is still reeling over the loss. All of the theatre people gather again in the theatre and Kevin premieres his memorial. He watches their reactions. Some are crying, some trying not to. He found his peace though and in making the video, Billy seems perhaps just a little less far away.