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The sky was crying snow. And her own tears started freezing on her face as soon as they hit the air. She really didn’t want to cry, it fell on her as suddenly as the wind of the oncoming blizzard.
It was well past the time Minerva’s husband was supposed to be home and all day, she’d kept a calm and level demeanor; he’ll show up soon! He always pushes through! Until the wind whipped her in the face, until the raindrops felt like sparks, until suddenly she couldn’t see where she was going and the trees were deafening in their rustling. And down the tears fell, all along her slapped raw cheeks.
She croaked his name, her meekness was drowned out in the blizzard. She was frozen, both in the weather and in place, unable to go forward with any decision, and she slammed her head into the knit muff covering her hands. She opened one eye and saw footprints, then sprinted. The snow was crunching underneath her, as though pushing upward in her hurry. The wind whipped at her clogged nose. The footprints finally led to the base of the nearest tree in the nearest forest, and she shrieked. She found Sir Pentious. And he felt like ice and could barely talk or lift his eyelids.
She gripped him and hoped her bursting heart would start warming him but he was too still to shiver, it was much deeper than his normal nerve stillness. Her heart sank into her stomach as she reached for those normally still legs, which this time were heavy as a dead body. The wind made her yell feel like a whisper: “Darling, PLEASE!” She removed her shawl to throw over him, then wrapped her headpiece further around her neck and ears. “You have to try and help me lift you, I cannot do it! I can’t!” Her overskirt dampened as her knees fell to the ground and the cold hit her like needles.
He let out a quick shaky breath, filled with fear and hurt at her voice, and slowly wrapped his arms around her shoulders, and used his entire body’s might to push himself up from the ground. After a few trials of hoisting him up onto her back, she couldn’t, and accidentally let his dead legs hit the ground a few times, gritting her teeth. She huffed as she wrapped her arms around his waist, having to force him to limp with her. They followed her footprints back to their isolated house which was still black. She put out the fire before she left and she cursed and cursed herself for her husband having to hang on longer as a result.
Immediately she laid his limp body on the floorboards next to the fireplace and shoveled all the paper at her disposal into the ashes. The mill he built them for birch bark oil had produced enough to light one lamp and she held it to his face before she lit the fireplace. His gloomy grey face, dripping with melting snowflakes.
“D-dear, no,” he said through his teeth, shivering, breathing like a stuttering engine. “I’m burning up..”
“How are you-?” She asked. She undressed as much as she possibly could and covered him in her over clothes, rolling him atop a quilt she placed next to him. She held onto his hands. “Are you going mad?” She turned and in her panic, a corner of the blanket caught light and she stamped it out with her flat shoe before breaking down and folding in on herself in a heap next to her melting husband. For a while, nothing was heard but the embers of the fire and the hiccups in her sobs and sniffles. And when she calmed, she gripped his icy fingers again, felt they were indeed still freezing, and blew hot air into his palms. She could still see the vapor she let out in the air and her heart clogged her throat and soured her eyes again. She may have to sleep with the fire on all night, or even stay up all night.
They only had some of the snow for water, it was being shoveled in via his other invention, a conveyor belt leading to a window. But she hadn’t the faintest on how to get it running for more. The wait for the water to boil was as painful as grabbing the handle without a cloth. And she could only boil so much, as she had to leave the rest for soup and cleaning. The only saving grace was that they’d harvested the root vegetables by now. She checked him, asked if he could move enough to navigate to the bed and he said nothing as he trekked up and she led him to the sheets.
Placing a steaming linen along his back and on his frostbitten forehead, she then lifted his chin and said “Drink, please,” before forcefully pouring a stash of their grain whisky into his mouth. “You need to warm yourself, don’t sleep.” She helped him swallow it as he winced and creaked out a moan at its burn. He tried to peel back the sheet in his hypothermia response but she pulled it back over him. Taking it no longer, she crawled in next to him and lay him against her chest in their bed. She slapped his face whenever his breathing slowed. It probably felt like the prick of a sharpened knife, but his voice anytime he tried to speak stopped in between letters like a dull one stuttering through butter.
“Th-th-th..the run-off bin..” he whispered. He tried getting up.
“No!” Minerva launched herself up and remembered, they could catch the falling snow in their run-off bin for more water for tomorrow. But she felt a grip at her waist.
When she looked back at him, he looked in so much pain.
She returned the look, sympathy drowning them both, but she had to let go and set the bin up. She tripped over the conveyor belt.
Useless. She was utterly useless.
“Useless.”
She looked up. He was still in the process of waking up, falling back to sleep, waking up some more. Sleep was safe now that he was almost fully melted, she let him. It felt like days went by, when it maybe was only one. And after a minute of being awake, this was what he said.
“I’m so utterly useless.”
She gulped. “Love.” She brought the sheet up to his chin and tucked him in more. “Absolutely not.”
“I haven’t the faintest what came over me..” Pentious still kept the hot linen by his head, gripped it in his hands as he was a bit more mobile now. “They ceased to work..I ran out of strength.”
Minerva rested her head against his shoulder. “You should take better care of yourself.”
“I know..” He gripped his face, almost in a slap. He stuttered in pain. “Therein lies something I cannot stand..I knew not when they’d stop!” He slapped his hand down on his knee, which seemed to need forever to melt after being frozen for so little time. “How shall I maintain any control?”
Minerva breathed, holding Pentious’ hand in hers, taking it away from his knee and rubbing it lightly. “Please, don’t harm yourself further!”
“And pray, what would be further?” His voice cracked. His strength only returned to utter the pain through words. Hot tears fell, they’d been sitting in his eyes long enough. Minerva gasped lightly and grasped even harder on his palm. “It is too overwhelming, they stall and freeze, with no control.” His body slowly curled in on hers. “They may as well not exist, right? Like I’d chop them off given the chance..” His voice broke. She cradled him as he constricted around her. “But alas, they feel invisible anyway. They’ve already been chopped, they cause nothing but this exhaustion over and over and over again, at the most inopportune moments, as if to laugh in my face…” The volume was raising, grit was bubbling and tearing at his throat, until he was a mess of tears and the most human of cries.
And his wife accompanied him until he was just laying against her in a sniffling puddle, falling victim to sleep yet again before he could even finish.
The next day while boiling more water, she found him wandering the cabin, attempting to re-oil the conveyor belt.
“Oh, lord!” she exclaimed. “Sit back down, Pen! Now!”
“And leave you to do all the work?” he returned, breathless, his eye bags casting shadows as big as his face in the fire light.
“You’ll get to work when you’re ready, you are not causing that freeze again.” She hoisted him up by his armpit.
He resisted but she could feel him shaking. “Minerva, don’t you dare!”
“Promise me this comfort at seeing you at rest!” She looked at him straight on. His lips were pursed in confused anger, worry wiping across his brow.
“I’m so ashamed..an invalid man, you’re forced to care for like a child..” His voice broke once again as his legs wobbled and bent in odd directions.
“I’m the one who should feel ashamed,” she answered, meeting their foreheads. “If I hadn’t moved you in that manner from the snow and forced you to walk… perhaps your legs would work..”
“Do not!” He snapped at her lovingly, soft but firm. “You couldn’t carry me..perish the thought.” He held onto her, rubbing her cheek, but he could only hold for so long.
She continued leading him back to the bed.
“Please, no..I can take this nothing no longer..” he whimpered, fighting. “If I fall victim to sleep one more time I shall scream..”
Minerva gave a sad smile. “We have the time. You needn’t keep yourself awake, we’ll lay together and whatever comes comes.” She placed him on his back, fought with him on whether the covers should stay on his chest cocooning him and his sweating shirt or not, and kneeled at the mat. Her chin rested on his arm.
He continued pouting to her soft smile, but over the next couple minutes, his anger eased. He brought a hand up to her face, brushing a curl from her temple, then cupping her chin lightly. His hands trembled.
“It’s alright.” She kissed his fingers.
He breathed in deeply, about to unleash the monologue of the century.
“You breathe it out, love, you do so with such fervor that I love so much..” She rubbed his shaking arm, which was gripping the linen like it was a piece of charcoal and he was frustratingly perfecting notes.
Out poured the pain yet again. “The sandman’s grip is slow, merciless, only weighted bags, not gripping but falling..”
She still smiled at him, even letting out a light wistful giggle. “I know. I know.”
“And if I feel out of control one more time, it will feel like another death. A drunk death filled with shadows and silent screams.”
She kissed his hand again, maintaining her loving stare, slowing her breathing to meet his chaos with calm, intaking his words with silent sadness.
“It feels like I’m being buried alive and I’m screaming beneath the coffin but they’ve ensured the dust keeps me suffocated…” His eyes shut with force as though his words were too much but unable to be stopped. “My lower back still feels like ice, and yet I’ve melted. It’s pricking me like it’s basting my skin to the bone.”
She offered more soft looks, even if he wasn’t meeting them, and slowly joined in the bed with him.
“It hurts even to feel, even to think. Days where my brain seemed like it worked feel so far away…” He gripped the hair by his temples. “Why can I not do anything? Where did it go? Why ought I do nothing while I leave you to take on everything in sight? But then, all of a sudden..what becomes of trying to do something? It only makes me more unable to do…anything.”
They both shook in tandem, both sniffling, taking in each others’ weakness. “You shan’t. It’s simple,” she offered. She smoothed his hair, his temples sweating, the thick strands a mess in his frustrated gripping.
“But!”
She shushed him with a soft finger to his dry lips. “Neither of us shall. Will you feel less like a bother then?”
A fire-ember-filled silence passed. He licked his lips and said, “I’m not sure anything could accomplish that..”
“Oh dear..” she lamented, softly sighing. She laid him against her full chest yet again.
“I’ll offer one thing that may?”
She perked up.
“You see that invention on the table?” With as much strength as he could muster, he eyed the belt-like equipment covered in tiny gears and tools that lay unfinished on the table by the fireplace.
“Your belt?” She leaned up, making the bed creak as much as his bones did. “The electropathic belt?”
It was advertised as a piece of equipment specially designed to add little soothing metal shocks to ease the pain of the back, and Pentious had worked on rewiring it for months and months.
“It’s rubbish,” the inventor said flatly. “It helped no one. Fake science coated in a false hope…”
They stared at it laying flatly on the wood.
“Crush it. Throw it on the ground.”
She stopped. “What- are you quite certain?”
“More than anything.” He almost whimpered when he touched her face, eyes desperate.
“What if it did indeed work?”
“It didn’t.”
“But what if you didn’t try hard eno- ” She stopped herself.
Pentious breathed out, his eyes closing.
“I know..I know all you do is try. Dear god, all you do every day is try,” Minerva offered as an alternative to what she was about to say and think.
“It’s.. far too difficult to look at it now.” He rubbed a knuckle. “I’ll build another if I so choose.”
She eyed him.
“After sleep, I suppose…if that’ll make you happy,” he said, grudgingly, with some humor.
She sighed and smiled sadly again, then eyed the dead invention. She hesitantly got up and took slow steps to it, her love’s modified device, which she assumed was helping, but held no healing this whole time. She looked at it with some cautious reverence as she did all his brilliant inventions, but in him she only saw disappointment and shame. More anger at his state. And how could he not be? How could he not feel unfairly treated by this cruel cold outside? The cruel banality of uncaring fate?
But he deserved to feel in control, to feel as though he could make a difference but deserve help. This was the first thing he’d asked her to do since his accident. He needed to feel like his rest held no burden. That his device, the pure symbol of him overworking himself, need not be finished. And she needed to give him that.
She smashed the belt to pieces on the floor and crushed it under her leather shoe, a deep cavernous clanking signifying a finality to the deed. Gears and screws flew. That false hope obliterated. The product of his productivity, released into ether, allowed to stop and fade. She met eyes with her husband once again and he looked so exhaustively satisfied that she felt it was worth it. He was propping himself up as much as he could, and he dropped his head down to his chest, relief, fatigue, all washing over him like a blizzard.
Minerva returned by his side and held his head in her hands. “Please, love..” She shared a long kiss with him, she felt him pull and want her intimacy and love like it was missing in the cold just as he was. “You are never a burden.”