Snowglobe Skyline
Written by Gregory Iannarella
Illustrated by Odera Igbokwe
Mechanical Whale Studios Copyright © 2016-2017. All Rights Reserved.
How does a thing look that burns?
Do you remember what Vic said? If he pissed his name into the side of your snow fort, it belonged to him. Do you remember what Dad said? That snow absorbs sound and attenuates vibrations. That it catches ambient noise. That’s why when it snows, it’s so quiet. And you told me later, over a cup of coffee, that that’s why you liked it. Because what you say in the snow gets caught, like how the voice of the ocean is stuck in a seashell. You press it to your ear, and you have it. If it never stops snowing, it’s yours.
Joshua opened his eyes. Phosphorescent tongues licked the room. The beams that propped the walls, the picture frames, everything burned. He went back to sleep and dreamed of a time, long before then, where love was so real, you could find it in the chambers or your heart like a small candle: burning and tired, and with your finger, touch it.
He gasped himself awake. Panicked and searching for air behind the iridescent sheet that clung to his body like a dress caught in the breeze that comes hopping off the tops of waves, he scratched at his throat until he no longer felt like he was drowning. Once he caught his breath, he was exhausted. Constellations of snow danced over him. They puffed to vapor, and then, into nothing.
But nothing burned, and nothing hurt. He felt, for once, nothing but solid earth—the air between him and everything else. He turned his head. His arm was on fire.
“O wow,” he said, drearily, licking his lips. “Fire’s so cool.” He started to close his eyes again and then his brain caught up with reality. “Whoa my God! I’m on fire. I’m on fire!”
He rolled and tripped—his muscles waking up, still. He yelled for help. He tried grabbing at the snow and wiping it on his arm but it receded from him and he rubbed and rubbed but nothing worked. He ran all the way down the street screaming in octaves only dogs can hear.
When he was so exhausted he sat on the curb, his panic faded. The whole world looked on fire. He looked at his legs, at his hands, he was naked, and on fire. He was on fire. Where he had lain, he left the mark of his body, charred black and smoking. When he stepped into the street, he saw Tokyo. Street signs, stop lights, skyscrapers and cars, and people trapped, encased in ice, their faces frozen, like mother’s used to say: keep making that face and it’ll freeze like that. And where he walked, things would melt. And in a shop window, he came face to face with the only thing more embarrassing than being on fire in a public place.
“O,” he said, “I’m naked.” And he was. Stark naked and covered in fire.
A whole day he walked and thought about the epic poem he just started writing about himself:
Where are the eyes of the Earth,
Who Froze the world,
I’m naked.
I’m totally on fire.
Fire is dope.
I’m totally dope.
Everything was shadow and snow and he walked each shadow away from him and no shadow of his own did he leave. No shadow followed his feet. His flame hummed and fed on snowflakes and the wind played the alleys and street signs of the hollow city. His fire light only reached so high, and buildings were obelisks swallowed by impenetrable, black clouds. He brought dead office buildings back to life—the small lantern in their throats—like the restaurants he loved, hidden in their basement hallways that kept the structure in glow and packed with giddy consciousness well into the night, strewn with spirits chomping on appetizers, men texting their mothers they’d be home late, dates chewing their straws, thinking: “God, he’s cute.”
He found his way to Tokyo tower and climbed the titanium stairs all the way to the top where the city should have looked like a fleet of fishing boats strewn across a concrete sea. But instead, the whole world was at the bottom of a well—completely dark and far away.
He walked to his apartment. On a car turned sideways in the street, a chubby bird sat frozen and dead. He waved his hand in circles around it until it defrosted and fell soggy onto the road.
He stepped into his small apartment. Everything started to drip. On his desk, a picture of him and his Grandmother caught his reflection. He looked like him, just naked and covered in fire. He reached out to hold it and it browned from the heat. He ran from the room and back outside to the frozen car. The bird was gone. He walked all the way around. He got on his hands and knees and looked underneath. He looked for prints of another animal that had, perhaps, come wandering by for lunch. But he found nothing. He looked up, into the black sky. The bird was gone.
“And now,” he said. “My final trick. To make the bird reappear! Hah!” he yelled, striking a stance he felt suggested power, sophistication, and charisma, reaching his flame covered fist to the sky. But nothing came back. “Ah hah!” he tried again.
Nothing.
“Well, then. Guess you’re a bad magician, Joshua. But you’re currently naked and covered in fire so whatever!” he yelled into a dark corridor, trying to kick a mound of snow but it melted before his foot even hit. And when he got tired of looking down the street, back at his apartment, feeling as though he didn’t know what to do, he began by taking one step this or that way, not really knowing which was which. He began with what he thought at the time to be far less dramatic than the situation called for. He began to walk.
The mute and marrow landscape, black and icing, suggested nothing more but that beyond the perimeter of his fire, a lonesomeness of significant depth cycloned around him in the stiff stillness of night. Snow and, maybe, a single bird, flew above him. The snow stopped sometimes. But windswept sheets smothered buildings and cars and lampposts into swollen shadows of themselves. They sparkled in Joshua’s light. He listened for a while, hoping to hear some noise on the wind. But all he heard was his flame: whooshing and whispering some unintelligible hiss.
His orange and blue membrane wrapped amorphous tentacles over the otherwise stiff and parallel lines of the road that reached back on him in colors of their own and made his hands and legs look more worn than he remembered, more stretched than usual. He was a world away—the earth covered in snow and a sky covered in gray cloud, and with no ice caps to sandwich the living: he was lost. True North; direction, swallowed with the grass and the sidewalks and the street lights. He narrowed his eyes. Looked up the road. His epic continued:
“Grandma,” he said. “I’m coming.”
*
On the second day, he found a girl. She began as a finger, poking through frost, its shadow like a sundial in his orbit. He stepped closer and the curtain of snow rolled back. Her arm was outstretched, fingers apart, and grasping wind. The curtain dripped away and when he put his fingers between hers and held her hand, she dripped puddles and fell and breathed and choked on air like a beached mermaid. She lay there, wearing a light t-shirt, soaked from the melted ice and slopped over her curved hips. Her stringy, wet, black hair stuck to her face and forehead in swirls.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Did you just come back to life? I don’t want to be weird, but You look like a mermaid. You know, without the fins. Sorry. I haven’t talked to anyone in a few days.”
“You’re burning me,” she said. Joshua released her hand. It looked like someone sandpapered the spaces between her fingers. He stood over her for a time. He watched her chest rise and fall. Her wide eyes searched around her and she seemed calm enough. When he saw that she was beginning to blister all over and the threads of her clothes were starting to spark, and the once sloping swirls of her hair were dry and splitting at their ends, he took a few steps back and sat waiting for her to warm. She was still too weak to really move
, tongue still too swollen to really talk. She was laying on her back and her breathing was stunted. She’d gag every once in a while. But she managed to roll on her side when she needed to. She rolled towards Joshua and stared at him.
“Well, don’t stare,” he said, covering his butt and crotch with his hands. “Can I talk to you? It’s just kind of awkward sitting in silence like this. I’ll just talk to you until you can move and stuff. Cool?” She furled her eyebrows and nodded her head just a bit.
“You wanna hear something crazy? So I’m from America. Specifically New Jersey. And my grandparents used to enter into these ballroom dancing competitions. But they’d jitterbug too. I don’t know how much of this you even get. But if you know anything about American culture, you’ll definitely get it. Anyway, they used to win all these trophies. Grandma said, “One time, we were dancing, and Bing Crosby was judging the competition.” My Great Grandpa used to wash Bing’s car. But that’s not important to this. So she always says: “He watched me and your Grandpa dance and he gave us a perfect score, and he came up after and grabbed my arm and said: ‘when you two dance, you look just like fire.” Joshua smiled at the ground. “Do you know Bing Crosby?” he asked. She nodded back to him. Then, she started to cry.
“Hey, wait. Hey.” He said. “It’s ok. I know this is scary. I’m scared too. But we’ll figure it out.” She was inconsolable. He wanted to go pat her head, or hold her, or put his hand on her shoulder, to reassure her with his body, that everything was going to be ok. “I know. I’ll go find you some food or something. Or some friends…no. That sounded weird. Like you’re a pet. I’m gonna go try to unfreeze some more people. Wait here.”
Joshua ran down the street, flame trailing behind him like a comet’s tail.
Parts of Tokyo appeared as if the sea swept over it and flash froze. He parted walls of ice into high tunnels. The ice melted into street signs and skyscrapers and cars with frozen families rolling down windows and taking pictures. He walked around one, looking at the kid inside making a face at his sister.
“You know, if you keep making that face, it’ll get stuck like that,” he said, making faces back at the boy until he felt silly.
“I used to make faces at my brother,” he said. “You’ll grow out of it. You two might even be friends.”
He touched their hands and they melted and with some practice, he timed it just right so as not to burn their fingers. He saw his reflection in shop windows and ran his fingers over his naked body—a shadow in flame. Standing there, each pore a furnace. He moved closer to the window. It began to wobble. With another step, it melted. He went back to find the girl, but she was gone. So, he kept going. And it wasn’t long before the soaked and shivering were following him around, if for no other reason, than to witness the sun of man walking around their soggy and crowding streets.
To ward off the loneliness, he told stories to the shadows of men and women beyond the perimeter of his light—those who wanted his warmth, but feared he was some kind of devil. They spoke to him, “arigato, arigato,” in whispers whether they understood him or not. “You all need to relax,” He said. But he got it. You wake up in a frozen world and there’s a naked dude on fire, wandering around and unfreezing people. First thoughts are: ‘what’s going on?’ Realize he’s American. Second thought: ‘O, we’re in hell.’
Each atom that fell on his flame sang the slumber song of evaporation and rocked him off as he scarred the ground black where he slept. Like strips of film, his memories spun, and his flame cast them on the walls in scenes he watched, like a stranger in his own life—like some stranger walking on the street who misses his family, so he borrows a stray one for the night, creeping up to a window and watching them live from behind their Sycamore tree. He peered in the window, watching himself.
The stove top flame was left flickering beneath the teapot as phantom Joshua watched his Grandma bring toast to the real Joshua. It was the day before he left for Japan. It was only a year, he explained to her. Just a one year teaching fellowship. Then he’d be back. In no time at all. Just like that, he said, snapping his fingers. She placed a plate in front of him and sat down.
She struggled to scratch her head around the ruby gem hair clip she wore. Joshua watched specks of dandruff drift down onto her shoulders and food.
His grandfather had passed some years ago, and every year since, Joshua noticed her toast rise slower and with a bit more shake to her mouth, as if she were trying to age faster: to catch him, to keep up, to follow him out the window and off into space. The problem with lovers is just so- that only one can die in the arms of the other. And it’s hard to stay awake all night without her laughter to keep you up, your eyes from drooping, your head from lulling, ‘til the sun pitches its bright blue dome on the atmosphere’s outer shell once again and you realize you got another day—and you’re grateful for it.
Joshua woke up.
The days following were spent panhandling for humans in the ice caps strewn across the city. At times, he felt like a gold toothed prospector fishing in the rivers for more yellow rocks to replace his rotting teeth. Sometimes, he’d imagined finding his family, and practiced what he’d say to them on the Mothers, Fathers, and their children. It usually took a while for them to be able to respond, and often there was a great deal of crying. He’d try slowly explaining the situation.
“It’s me, Mom and Dad. It’s Joshie. I’ve come back for you. It’s me, your son. I’m covered in fire now,” he’d say, hoping the Japanese parents couldn’t understand him. Some of them would start crying before they could speak, almost instantly, and it was those he suspected could understand him. Other times, when he was feeling silly, he’d spread his arms out, looming over their soaked and steaming bodies, limp like overcooked spaghetti, and practice what he called his “hero’s introduction.”
“It is I. The Phosphorous Phoenix…no…The Flame! Flame Retardant!....Candle in the Wind!... It’s me: Bob Dylan.” He’d had some practice with introducing alter egos. He’d been somewhat of an amateur magician in his high school years. The Amazing Mr. Cricket, he’d called himself, and that always felt right. None of the names he’d thought of yet felt right, but he was getting close. Other times, he’d forget what to say, so he’d just say “I love you, I love you, I love you,” as fast as he could until the words didn’t sound like themselves anymore. One time, a two year old recovered from his unused muscles quicker than usual and started chasing Joshua around, playfully. “I’m Josh,” he said to it, running one way, “It’s nice to meet you,” he said, doubling back, running in circles. “Hot, hot, don’t touch. Don’t touch,” he said, until baby had spent his energy and cuddled into his mother, waiting for her to gain control of her muscles once more. And when he stumbled upon the zoo, Joshua unfroze the elephants first, as any good magician would, and if he accidently lit a tree on fire, he’d have to walk all day to escape the glow on the horizon.
He noticed an odd phenomenon. There were times he’d unfreeze children, and their parents would be nowhere in sight. He imagined they were walking home from school when it happened, when things froze. They followed him, threw snowballs into his fire, and after some time, left. And after a few weeks, he’d catch glimpses of what could only be children—small, human forms, sprinting between buildings when they thought he wasn’t looking, or peering at him from behind cars or shop windows, wearing white masks with gray lines on the faces, and big holes for eyes. He’d meant to offer them some solace, a home by his side. But he was trying to be conscious not to know himself as some deity and not to impose that on others. He just wanted to be Josh—the dude. And he doubted, in his broken Japanese, that he could impart the nuances of that to these kids.
One day, he awoke to find a girl watching him sleep. Most of the people he’d unfrozen so far would follow him, but never really ventured too close. She was sweating. Her layers of precisely folded clothes lay next to her so that she only wore a shirt and shorts. She must have been there a while. That was weird�
��people watching you sleep. Being embarrassed of what you might have dreamed, and what they might have seen, you talking or something, or mouth open and snoring. The ground around him was charred up to her feet. She was barefoot and pigeon toed, but her thighs curved dramatically, and her long black hair she wore as one loose rope draped down her left shoulder, almost completely covering the left side of her chest.
“Just like fire,” she said.
“Mermaid,” Joshua responded. “What’s your name?” he managed in Japanese.
“My name is Kami,” she said in Japanese, “I speak English,” she said in English.
“Well that’s very good,” Joshua rose, “because my Japanese isn’t very good…Joshua,” he said pointing to himself.
They were both smiling at each other, Kami’s eyes wandering up and down his flaming form when, from down a corridor, up the alleys, it echoed: a scream. They both looked to where the buildings were gap-toothed, there was another scream and Joshua ran. Kami followed him until they came to a clearing where a crowd of children in white and gray masks and tattered clothes stood staring at him. Behind them stood a man, no mask, but face painted with the same grey lines. He had a gun.
He pressed it to a child’s head, said something, then to another’s. He pressed it into each child’s head, pointing to a space in front of them with his finger, making demands in Japanese. Joshua moved there. The man waved the gun to indicate that he kneel. He did. The man began speaking to the children.
“He’s telling them,” Kami said, “He’s telling them to walk into you!” she was yelling. Joshua looked at the man.
“That’s a huge mistake,” he said. He felt his anger manifest in his flames, down in his pores like bubbles boiling up from under potatoes in a stew. A child began walking to him. Joshua put up his hands and said, “It’s okay, buddy. Come on over.”
The child’s mask was starting to crinkle, he was crying.
Snow Globe Skyline Page 1