Drifters

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

An early extract from a story I am working on.

We were two winters in Yorkshire, which was one too many. Words like cruel, bleak and harsh would not do it justice. Tragic comes close, since those winters felt like missed opportunities for trivial things such as living. The Februaries were worst, and here’s a tragic irony for you: the shortest month felt like the opposite, simultaneously tortured and tortuous. The sun put in brief and glorious appearances, as if to remind us of what we had lost; but most of the time it cosied up behind thick layers of grey cloud, a taunting smudge in an uncaring sky; and if it’s true that it shines on the righteous, it had judged us damned.

Snow and floods cut us off from things like power, water, food, culture, company and decent broadband. This would go on for days, so much so that we were no better than animals, especially those of us who had not renewed our prescriptions. Oh, the pills. Lord, save me from another drought of those little beauties. They kept me going until they didn’t and that was when, during the second February, I began to obsess over hibernation. I’d read that book of course: the one about the woman in New York who spends a year in chemical dormancy. But we’d been to New York and I wasn’t buying it. There were distractions aplenty to get you through winter in the Big Apple, even the harsh ones. We were almost killed by a sheet of ice falling from a distant balcony or rooftop and that was when I figured out why they had canopies and awnings outside of buildings. That, and for when they were waiting for taxis. No one walked anywhere, apart from tourists.

I’d also read about French peasants who would put on all their clothes and take to their beds for the harshest months. They trained themselves to sleep through the worst of it, which for me felt like a victory for the little people. In the end I couldn’t see a way of doing it without missing out on my daily meds, and going for months without them was not an option for me and those nearby. So we closed ourselves down and got through it as best we could. It took all of spring’s improbable powers to heave us from our funk, by which point we’d missed the lambs, the narcissi, the nesting birds and the gentle flirtations of that arbitrary sun. By the time the second spring came around we had resolved to up sticks and get the hell out of Dodge.