WATER ON THE MOVE
kurt nimmo
Thomas considered the snow.
It was late afternoon and the sun was almost down. Snow went off through dark green pines. Thomas stood near the road edge, where a three foot high bank of snow had earlier been shaped, and stared off into the woods. Out there, he imagined, water moved in a river. Because water moved it did not freeze. Thomas had an urge to find the river and follow it to wherever it went. But the snow was everywhere and up to his knees. He stood there thinking about it.
They were all back at the cabin. All of them were married, with children, and this had done something irrevocable to their lives. They were there for a clan reunion. Thomas was the unmarried one. Now, as he stood there staring at the dark pines and flat white snow, he felt as if his unmarried and childless status were a burden. It’s difficult to breathe, he thought, especially when trapped in the cabin with all of them. At this moment he’d rather be out in the cold where the spaces were large and unobstructed. He wanted to walk off through the snow and find that river of moving water.
layne had married his friend. Thomas had been with her a decade before. It had never worked out between them. Like all the women in his life, Jayne had wanted him to change. He was writing back then. Not much and not very good, but writing. Now he held no illusions about writing or anything else. Thomas drank and the creative part of his life was now nothing more than a shadow. He saw himself lost out there in the dark spaces between pine trees. There was nothing left to put down on paper.
Thomas didn’t know her. She was another person now, a stranger. When he looked at her there seemed to be few associated memories. Drinking had done that, or so he told himself. Drinking was a form of cowardice. None of the clan drank like he did. They had gravity in their lives while he combated weightlessness. Drinking was necessary, an anchor which prevented him from floating away entirely. Thomas feared sobriety.
Everything, he thought, is out of control.
He had threatened to kill her. She would, of course, never forgive him. Now, a decade later, she looked at him like a person looks at a rabid dog -- never certain when and where the animal might bite. Thomas didn’t hold it against her. She had every right to mistrust him, to stay away from him. Her almost banal politeness and empty conversation perturbed him. It was this conversation and particularly the uneasiness of her eyes which had made Thomas decide to go through the cabin door and down the road until he reached the darkness of pines some distance away. He wanted to be alone. He wanted the conversation to end. Silence. He wanted to find the river and follow it to wherever it went. That he might get lost or even freeze to death didn’t concern him. It really didn’t seem all that important.
Now the sun was down.
Snow took on a deepening blue as darkness approached. Thomas remembered that the snow was this same color the afternoon he had discovered them together. He had threatened her. Then she moved her things out. For a long time after, he remembered, the snow was that same cold empty blue color. The color it was now as he stood there remembering. That he remembered at all, after such and expanse of nothingness, surprised him.
What I need, Thomas thought, is a drink.
When he turned away from the woods he saw where the road stretched out and went in a northerly direction. There, where the road began its descent into a semicircle of denuded hardwoods, sat the small cabin. Warm yellow light burned through cabin windows. Thomas moved slowly, instinctively toward the light. The evening was very quiet and cold, the sky a dark purple sprinkled with faraway stars. Water moved, he knew, hidden in the dark expanse at his left. Thomas sincerely wanted a good stiff drink. It was this need and his cowardice which moved him down the road. The indifference of nature, and its peculiar ability to kill without retribution or judgement, filled him with a numb acceptance. His failures no longer seemed important. Wind moved through pines. Thomas imagined the taste of scotch. He’d mix it with cold water.
