Love is a Snow-Lettered Word

Short story

A whole song in, and ice water feels hot as fire.

It’s Next Sunday AD at the apocalypse. Wet leather smell? Rotten dust-mud steeped in still stagnant murk; it’s coming from the limp stack of artificial body parts. The vending machine named Dinah purrs with its head cocked. A Mock Cat sitting by a holocaust of mannequins is what it all looks like and the cat-shaped robotic vending machine says: "Found you! Happy Valentine’s Day, have a Pepsi!"

A plastic bottle pops out from Dinah's chest and then rolls to a stop at the base of the body parts. The soda inside is viscous black tar— it stopped being Pepsi long ago. Ask me how I know. Better smelling, still, than all of the rot-mud if opened.

"I promise I won’t make fun of you for being too lazy to get your Driver's License,” says Dinah, “but only if you tell me a story."

Climbing out beneath the grisly pile of prosthetic parts I trip on a plastic hand and land on the bottle. I tell Dinah to fuck off, I don’t trust a robot that’s friend-shaped to keep me brand loyal.

Sighing, I push myself back to my feet. The black splattered tar running down my chest? Surprise, the acrid scent of vomit-bile and sugar is worse than the dust-mud leather stench. If I had a stomach I'd be wretching. I consider wiping the Pepsi-sick off of me then shrug. I look like a cheap mannequin covered in cracked and peeling pleather. We're beyond giving a damn.

With a head bunt, Dinah asks: "Playing hide and seek?"

Kicking the crushed bottle away, I tell Dinah about the Amazon Delivery Buzzard-thing. Its name is something stupid like Beth or Brian or Bozo… whatever, you hide if you hear it.

"Cool story brah,” Dinah’s not even looking at me, its plastic carapace shell stark red and blue pops against the washed-out earth tones of ruin around us. "Tell me another one."

Fine. Did you know people used to die of dehydration from eating snow? During my third-grade field trip, they’d tell us kids the body expends too much energy fending off the snow’s temperature if you eat it without boiling it first. Then they’d hand you a bullion cube. Yes, Dinah, snow’s like those pictures of ice on the other vending machines. No, not quite like the valley of ash in the ruined city; that used to be people. Combine the two and it's sorta like that. You wanted a story on Valentine’s Day? Let me tell you about my ex and field trips.

Her field trips were all candy factories and grand museums. Mine? I went to the nearby Donner Memorial State Park. One reason I know your hands submerged in ice will feel like they’re on fire if you hold them there the length of a song is because of the plight of the Donners. While braving the wagon trail the Donners took a shortcut near Tahoe but got snowed in place before Halloween. At the field trip, they'd show you the Pioneer Monument’s brass statues on top of a twenty-two-foot base. It’s as high as the depth of the snow that year. The fastest way I learned to conceptualize twenty-two feet of snow was standing with my toes touching the base before I’d look up. My neck’s straining and the base is so high I can’t see the statues so next I’d lay down with feet still at the base. Looking up I could barely see the figures’ brass shoes beneath the sun. She got to eat several kinds of taffy while I was doing this.

When the cities were still lived in, this one Valentine’s Day we were telling each other about our childhood field trips when she tells me to get into the car, tells me she has a surprise and to wear my gloves. I grabbed my fingerless ones because she likes how I look in them. She planned a ‘field trip’ of our own to the nearby mountains and as she's driving—

"Because you don't have your driver's license?" Dinah yawns.

I tell it to shut up, now too aware the Pepsi-sick on my plastic chest will harden into a permanent Rorschach test. Was that the sound of flapping buzzard wings in the distance, or a tattered flag protesting the wind? I wiggle my fingers and tell it to pay attention:

I’m spacing out in the car when I remember how there’s a pair of leather shoes under a glass case at the Donner’s campsite. Child shoes. I ask her if the car is all-wheeled. I ask if she has chains for the tires. I ask even knowing the answer, but she was raised by a mother who never admitted fault so when she replies "Would I fucking buy a car that didn’t?" I insist we stop and buy a shovel. In a fight, she keeps a mental stenographer going while my attention span is shorter than my dick. She was raised by a mother who said I'm sorry the same number of times credible sightings of bigfoot happened. I apologize all the time and it loses meaning.

While she got chocolate samples, my teacher asked me to pay special attention to those shoes. They aren't boots, are they? Could you fit in them? Winter was cold enough that when you pinched your nostrils and let go they'd stay stuck. Why would a kid remove their shoes if it was so cold? Now notice, children, these shoes have been boiled. Are those bite marks you see?

With a new shovel and a Pepsi which she can’t stand to watch me sip, we get to the parking lot and she's heard about the boiled kid shoes dozens of times before, she’s patient though because she loves me. Her eyes are on the road when she asks me, “If we got one of those new robot bodies for mind transfer and live forever, would you do it?” I’m patient too. She asks the same question every time she’s stoned and never remembers what I say unless it’s a fight. I ask her what color robot body she’d like. She’s not listening, I try again and ask if she’d still love me if I did. She curses before turning off the music. One detour, one tiny stop, and the parking lot is packed. Packed with cars, packed with people, and packed with snow. There is no choice but to park at the very back of the lot. At least the car went downhill easy enough.

Don't tell me she never loved me. Anything below seventy and she'd shiver. If I wished her a Happy Valentine's Day more than once she'd make a fist and grit her teeth. Yet here she was in the mountains on a Hallmark holiday, because I can’t shut up about snow. Paying her love through work and not words.

“So you chose the shitty white robot body on purpose?” Dinah asks with a squint.

It was cheap, I say absentmindedly clenching then releasing my hands. I can't feel them. If it was the sound of a tattered flag, we're fine. But if it wasn't...

Did the Donners know it was Valentine's Day when a mother boiled shoes for her kids to eat? Take a ziplock bag, press all of the air out of it, and twist— like their stomachs, tight and small since Christmas. The kind of hunger, the sort of incessant voracious pain you'd risk your toes to turn black and fall off for something resembling an idea of a snack. Too late for a mother to apologize for taking the wrong route, she gets to boiling.

“After your trip, she had to drive you back, didn’t she?” asks Dinah stretching. “She takes you out like that and you don’t even—”

Shut up. Shut up, and yes.

Downhill is uphill when on the way out. Everyone else in the parking lot has left. Back car tires spin in place pitching up pieces of snow. I should have bought chains instead of a shovel, should have pushed the issue, but my need to keep peace was too strong. No fights on Valentine’s Day at all costs. I get behind the car to push. No, not because of guilt or a false sense of a man’s duty, though those things are true, too. The fact is she's stronger, but I don't have a driver’s license. She has to drive.

Thank god for the shovel, but the detour cost us daylight. The sun has dipped down behind the mountains, and with every rock album played in the car the temperature outside drops four more degrees. It's not night but the headlights are on. Wet snow kicking up and the tires are polishing what's beneath into a concave mirror. Pushing helps, but it needs friction which means shoveling out the polish before replacing it with fresh packed snow. With something for the tire treads to hold onto, even temporarily, I push and the car moves forward a tad. I tell her to gas it as my boots are dug in with all my weight behind it and the car moves just out of my reach and I fall with my hands out in front of me, fingerless gloves now deep in snow. The car has moved only the length of my height.

The Donner family, when you visit their historic campsite, there is one question on your mind. They aren't famous for boiling shoes. Your first time there you can't wait to ask. Your hand fires up bottle rocket fast and you're still not the first to ask how many people they ate. Harrowing survival through brutal winter is all on record in handwritten journals and preserved tools under glass but what you care about is the body count served on the table. They’ll tell you it wasn’t many, but yes, they fed the children meat from dead family members when there was nothing else. Caring for the kids through the work of cannibalism.

It doesn’t hit you until much later in life, but the bullion cubes you were taught to keep in your survival kit, it's not for making stew. It’s what they tell you but it isn’t. If you are making stew in the wilderness, you aren't surviving you're living. The cube is the shoes. It takes your mind off of the twisted bag you have for a stomach. It’s not to help you live in the wilderness, it's to help you live long enough to be found.

In this ruined world around me with my only companion a talking robotic soda dispenser, I'm hoping against it all she’s out there; she’ll find me. Absently I’m clenching and relaxing my hands.

She’s inside the car listening to a song so loud I can hear it even over the screaming tires. Shoving the car goes like this: Shovel, push, fall, get up— shovel push fall get up. Each time my fingerless gloves get a tiny bit of snow on them and the heat from my hand melts it.

To play along: put on a song and stick your hand in a bucket with below-freezing water. Keep it there until the music is done. Intro: you feel a tingle. Verse: your hand turns red. Chorus: that tingle ramps up to tiny pinpricks, and you clench your jaw. Hook: this is not a playful game anymore. Your blood is turning into ice crystals and frostnip begins. Those pinpricks are needles stabbing now. You have to fight yourself from taking your hand out. Hook: for a moment your hand feels warm. Bridge: Fire. Burning. Most people fail to keep their hands underwater at this stage. Outro: Your nerves, while they can still function are doing everything in their power to make you feel as much pain as possible because if you do not remove your hand, if you do not get them warm soon you’ll go numb. Numb means broken. Numb means dying. The song starts over. Push: pressing against the back hood of the car makes your palms feel raw. Fall: she must not be paying attention while she gasses the peddle, probably doesn’t know it’s on repeat. Shovel: it’s getting harder to do that because your fingers can’t grip it that well. The song starts over. Push: frostnip, red-purple skin damage is temporary. Fall: frostbite with surface-level damage, skin peels, hands swell, blistering imminent. Shovel: frostbite with deep subcutaneous damage, absolute numbness, seek medical attention immediately, skin black for its own funeral because it is dead. The song starts over. Push: the Donner’s rescue party was overwhelmed by the horrible stench even before a soul was sighted. Emaciated gangrene and crazy, the surviving members were found four days after Valentine’s Day. Few could walk. Thirteen dead. Little food was given as relief out of fear that the Donners would die from the shock of it. If you don’t push harder she could be like them. Fall: fuck, you knew better than this, you overly repentant coward. Knew better than all of this but every fight with her feels like a little bit more snow on your hands, every bitter word and disagreement feels like you are heading closer to amputation. You go forward, you show work, but it’s your words as sharp as this cutting sensation raking across what’s little left of your nerves, you fall and each time you do she gets even more numb. You move forward but you can't hold on. Shovel: the world has ended and she’s gone but even if she weren’t would she even hold your robotic hand?

All of that hard work, it's silly but I just want the soda. She has the car heater vomiting out sun because she loves me and she apologizes, she admits that she was wrong as I grab for the Pepsi, but my hands will not hold it— spilling cola all over my shirt. I clench and wiggle my fingers in front of the heater trying to get circulation into them. She asks if I'm okay and I don't want her to feel guilty, but it's way worse than I tell her. If I don't get blood pumping to them now meat will be chopped. Could be the tips of the fingers or it might have to be the whole thing.

While I was learning about the Donner family’s cannibalism, she was at a candy factory. But she hates sweets. Can't stand the stuff. It’s why she can’t look at me when I drink the soda.

They look like a mannequin’s do but with cheap pleather for gripping, yet I still clench them for blood circulation which never came. The wind is silent and I slap my fake hand to my fake head as the buzzard’s name comes to me.

"What is it?" Dinah asks hackles up looking to the sky.

I tell it the name was “Bathos”. It cocks its head. I tell it to look it up.

This talking vending machine, it’s not her, but like the shoes maybe it will help me survive long enough to be found. Numb I can do. Out here, party of one at the apocalypse, I'm hoping she changed her mind. About all of it, sure, but especially the part about transferring your mind to a robot body. A fake me, a fake you, with our fake cat, pushing through this apocalypse as a Mock Family… Why not?

The vending machine stops purring. It isn’t looking at me either. Cats. Typical. Its chest opens up and something which used to be a Pepsi slowly rolls out of it, "Happy Valentine's Day," it says.

"Yeah," I relax my hands and pet Dinah, "Happy Valentine's Day."

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M.P. Fitzgerald writes darkly humorous sci-fi for dream criminals. You should read his short story Roko’s Lathe™ and look into his upgrades. Dr. Pepper’s better.