The Desert in the North
by JoSelle VanderhooftYou may not see me for myself at first, with my green-glass glaciers and the northern lights. But beneath this, I am as deadly-pale as ever, a desert still. In the dying light, in a land as dead as your collective dreams, you hear the wind gust across the snow, laying your fair flames so flat they line your brows. You cross yourselves. Brown eyes upon brown eyes upon brown eyes, the wall of self-same flesh and skin and umber parkas, you peer into my darkness ("too blue," one whispers, "to be night at all") and wonder what is there. Above you only see the tilting stars, and all around you there is only snow that sucks down sky into itself. As one you rub your hands, as one you wonder if that hollow sound is just the wind. If it is your death rattle.
From the glacial wall against your backs, I watch you now, my breasts heavy in the frost, legs parted in a crouch. I look at you, so small within my body's scope, and laugh a fall of ice about your ears. Cliffs, floes and ice; these are my visages, my second-selves, my several masques of death. They hide the thing I am, this thing of claws and fleeting glances. Remember them. Remember me, though you won't soon forget. How could you, forget poor things that you are? Now that I've paced behind you underneath the sun's weak eye, hovered just behind your eyes like heat lines in my hotter friends, you think that you've seen ghosts. You twine your hands like worms beneath your gloves, as if you could soothe back the heat I hourly suck from your frost-bitten cheeks. Ice-hard beneath your parkas and fleece, you can't undo the chill. So you sleep while I unseam your proteins like old lace, so slowly you can not feel the tell-tale pop of life and flaking cells, until I raised the curtains on the dawn and dispelled the strange dreams you had suffered in breaths to hush the dead.
A woman, you say, carved by a glacier's blade, ice-mottled skin so clear you could look through and see the ice age veins, the saber-toothed spine, the blue-barbed nipples and her hair that sweeps between your toes, raising up hives and gangrene You laugh at first, of course - men that you are. You missed your wives, your sweethearts, your mistresses. You were oversexed and underlaid, you joked between sharp breaths. Still the dream clings to your bones. You slept again and woke to find a foot, a left hand, a nose, a wedding finger crumpled and blackened like dirty rags. Your eyes search low upon the sky, high in the mountains for the howls of unseen creatures. Deep-heeled, unspeakably clawed, they ring your dwindling camp. As you leave the blue and graying to the sleep that dwindles out into a line, you think you hear a breath. You grow afraid.
You'd packed so well, you said among yourselves. (I heard you; I hear everything. This is my body, after all.) You had your boots, your gloves, your tents and stoves. You were so thick, so quick, how could you not escape the South Pole's jaws as you sought her navel for your flag?
And so, you push the blood back through your remnant fingers. You shake your grizzled heads, too heavy now with cold and starvation to feed the swelling meat inside. So you do the morning after – and after, after, after (if you can still call them mornings.) Your clocks have frozen at the hour of three. Time shatters like icicles, and still you advance, discontented to stare down death and give your last consent.
It will go hard, of course. You are young men, strong men, anxious still to reach the howling pole, despite the iron in your joints, the needles in your lungs. But I will have you in the end. I always do. And secretly, you know you want me, too. Glassy-eyed and wild, you move desperately and slowly, even as the flash-pan kerosene strikes up your slender breakfast; a few sticks of tanned hide and lumpy coffee. Here I laugh again, and you look up, alarmed. Each spring back home, you say, you've heard the gunshot of the river as it breaks through the ice.
But here, there are no rivers and no springs, not in your eyes. Only the howl of my bemusement. When you talk you say it worries you. But when you are alone, you close your eyes, and see me spread sky-wide and cold, and you know your fears are founded. I do not treat my suitors so politely. I do not court their tongues with dates and figs, or flatter them with false oases dancing in the heat. I do not cling and beg them to remain. I do not strike them down when they say no.
I have far better ways to keep them here.
They don't hear my approach 'til it's too late -- they feel so prickly warm. As if they cut a path through August, faces lost inside the spring coil of ears and blowing hair. And so they lie stiff in their sleeping bags as I curl around them one last time. I reach inside, through pulsing marrow and hopping arteries, and there burn. Some more I might crush beneath a glacial avalanche, or bury in the wind and drifting snow. The ones who fight me hardest, I might spare for ashile so they can see their journey's end. So it can dazzle in their faces like the stars, so they can stand inside the world's nadir just before I remove my final mask; just before they see me laughing, biting, terrible as everything and all.
It's these I truly love, these I desire, these I preserve the best so, years from now, another careless party will set out, and seeing them against my breast stare down and say, "how beautiful," and then kneel down. Too numb to stand and silenced by my power.
©JoSelle Vanderhooft
JoSelle Vanderhooft is the author of the novel The Tale of the Miller's Daughter (Papaveria Press), and the forthcoming poetry collections The Minotaur's Last Letter to His Mother (Ash Phoenix), Desert Dreams (Papaveria) and Desert Songs (Cross-Cultural Communications). Her second novel, Owl Skin, will be released this December from Papaveria Press. Her fiction has appeared several times in Reflection's Edge and Byzarium, and her poetry can be found in a number of zines such as Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Star*Line and Cabinet des Fees.