Cold Fury
by Josephine Livingstone
So, the snowstorm wasn’t as violent as you wanted it to be. You wanted it to howl in your windows, to bury the homeless and freeze-scorch the earth. You wanted to cower in the face of its might. Aren’t you disappointed that you’re not trapped in your home, that you can’t carve one of those beer-shelves in the snow piled up outside the door? What a pity. Poor old you.
Stop yearning for it! Snow kills people. It’s like a dangerous animal. It will let you cavort nearby, but get too close and it’ll murder you dead. In fact, I hate snow. It hasn’t always been like this: I remember putting a tiny snowman in the freezer and opening the door every hour, just to check that my beautiful creation could truly be real, like everybody else. That was fine. It is magical enough in the paintings of Pissarro and the odd infant memory, sure. But snow causes disaster, and lusting after it is morbid.
The Fall
A few years back, I was at my friend Sarah’s birthday party. Sarah’s birthday is in January, so she always has the first party of the year (not counting the second half of New Year’s). Early in the evening, it had only been a little cold. Down we all went, down the staircase to the bar in London that is done up like an old-fashioned living room. It started to snow during the party. But nobody really noticed, because we were underground. We drank out of then-chic teacups. Time slipped past. I spoke to many old friends, then it was time to go home. We had to run for the last train, at Goodge Street.
The train ride passed, as most drunken ones do, blurrily. I remember having to do a gazelle-leap for the doors because I had got distracted into my book. Now I’m on the escalator. Now I’m at the exit. Holy shit! The air was colorless, because it was silent. The sky was a thick, glassy black. The ground was utterly white. I felt sorry for myself for a moment, then put on my headphones and started to walk.
Some time later, I woke up sort of gnashing my eyelids. As soon as I had managed to open them a tiny bit, I started to blink and grimace, because there was snow in my eyelashes. Moving my head slightly, I realised that it hurt. Blink, blink, grimace. Oh! I am covered in a thin layer of snow. Turning my hurting head, I see a big black tree, looming out of the big soft white. Long ravines in the snow show that I have slipped, although their edges have been softened by fresh fall. I don’t know how long I lay there knocked out, or what woke me up. Do not wear high heels to parties in January.
The Blood
This happened even longer ago — eleven years? twelve? — so the contours are vague. It was in Prague, and I had been in Kafka’s house. Sounds glamorous, but this is a story about being a teen moron. At Kafka’s house, I had bought a version of The Metamorphosis in German for basically no reason. The clock-tower in the square has skeletons on it and I had a headache. Wearing a huge idiot trenchcoat, I walked around the museum that is at the top of a big flight of steps at the end of a long boulevard that slices through the city. A big metal horse sculpture reared up with a man on it. I smoked many, tiny Vogue cigarettes. The night before I had been walking on the heels of my boots in the hotel lobby and a man had told me in French that I would break my neck doing that. I looked at the fat snow outside the museum, watching my ash falling, and then red decorations started to fall out of my face. Having a violent nosebleed on snow while looking out at an ornate city, outside a building full of velvet the color of blood, sounds really good and picturesque but actually is embarrassing because its only happening because you’re an idiot, and you realise that horribly quickly.
The Fear
Two years ago, I went skiing. I know, that doesn’t sound so bad. But you must understand that I had never been before, because I am scared of the things that posh people do, and I only accepted the invitation because I wanted to hang out with my cousins and because I would have felt like a coward if I’d said no out of fear. Ironically enough, my terrible fear of heights caused me to vomit from sheer terror regularly throughout the trip. Every day, I woke with the knowledge that I would have to get on a contraption that would hoist me to gut-liquefying heights, then drop me into a scenario barely conjurable in my worst nightmares: the top of a mountain. I have never been so afraid, never in my life, and every day so long as I live I will be a little bit happier for the knowledge that I’ll never have to do it again.
Why didn’t I predict that drinking in heels in the snow would make me fall over? Why didn’t I figure that being a chain-smoking child in a freezing country would make me ill? Why didn’t I realize that I would be so frightened on the mountain that I would consider deliberately breaking a limb to get off it? I don’t know. There’s something about snow that muffles the brain. It makes us slow, stupid, our worst selves. The only thing good about snow is that one song about the fox and the boy on the bike and so on. Everything else I can do without. Let’s hope this pale eyesore melts, and fast.