Salt By Sodom!

White drift gathered along the ends of Brother’s eyelashes and pooled in the corners of his blue eyelids. The snow fell along his padded legs and his North Face jacket, dusting him. I thought of a baker sprinkling powdered sugar on a jelly donut; an apt comparison, although the mirage of hot food curdled my optimism for the situation, and home frowned on cannibalism, even if Brother was meaty enough to last me the whole excursion. The tips of his black-gloved fingers had long ago been chewed by the rising ground.

Through the slit of my head wrap and from the relative comfort of a rotting stump feet away from Brother, I could continue to stare at his teal, glasslike flesh. The epithelium is brittle, and fissures at the lips. At some point his fingertips and face would split open the same way ripening oranges do before they give up and hit the ground. Agh. I endeavored to find some way to ameliorate the gnaw of hunger.

I removed a thermos from my backpack and unscrewed the top, then freed an opening in my wraps and took a gulp of the steaming coffee. In the distance, I recognized some piece of caramel flotsam sailing solitarily in the snow. The trial of making my way through a foot of snow was a persistent one, which was the one thing Brother now had going for him as the pristine flakes continued to settle on his puffy, navy blue outerwear and cerulean skin. A few yards from him stood the brown beer bottle I had spied, its body sticking out like the periscope of a derelict submarine. I pulled it out and brushed away some of the gathering frost. “Harpoon IPA.” A pleasantly-colorful label, if obnoxious.

The forest was silent, save the scuffling of amassed snow occasionally descending from the network of pine branches above me. A sort of numb life emanated from the world beneath; the preternatural feeling of an entire population, an entire ecology, underfoot and dormant for months. It was a sad discomfort. I looked to Brother, his pudgy arms sinking into the thick strata of frost.

I took a few steps into the vast beyond, a blank curtain of white noise, pale and oblique. The rough bases of trees extending up into the sky were as visible as bits of cookie fallen into a glass of milk. Brother, when would my next meal be? Brother, what

must I fear most: the silence of your freezing corpse, or my own reticence in the face of uncertainty and death?

The cutting barking of a mutt. Instinctively, I fell to the snow bed. Then a faint whine from far away. Clinging tight to water, gloved fists clenched and jaws rigid. Minutes froze into hours; the morning sun had soared to the top of the sky, blearing down above me. Eyes shut, I still felt myself going blind, or numb, or both. Does one feel themselves going numb? Perhaps the knowledge that you cannot feel any longer is pain enough to blister even than the softest nerve endings. Brother lay the distance of a couple bodies away.

Some time had passed. I was cold and stiff, and ever bending joints again was a distant fantasy, a derelict dream.

Through the silence and haze of a failing consciousness, I became aware of a light and quick crushing moving toward me. Matter compounded inward meters, yards, feet away from me. Something far away was transitioning to something close. A force approached; heart beating, lungs expanding and contracting, pupils pinched by light reflecting off the snow. It came near, until I could feel its being — its warmth and energy — fluttering above me.

I somehow came to realize that wasn’t a soul fluttering — it was a nose. A threadbare reality set in, and brought renewed terror along with it. A long-nailed paw started to pry through the snow, and I had barely any sense to react. It pressed upon my jacket and must have noticed a tactile discrepancy, as it continued to brush away the clumps of powder concealing my torso.

By the time its damp nose reached my eyelashes, I had given enough thought to what I would do.

Wet, pink sandpaper lapped the frost away from the crevice in my head wrap, and the warmth of her breath trickled through the pores of my protective cloth. I could see the pointed snout, the bright and alert eyes, the chocolate fur. She was radiant, alive, curious, without a trace of malice in her intention. Life and enjoyment of life’s bounty was of singular import to her. I can only wonder if she could taste the salt along my eyelids.

She barked playfully, her tail wagging.

I rolled from under her pawing and leaped. Something miniature and pointed whirred by my head. I reached for the beer bottle. Another bark. She came towards. I jumped toward her.

The bottle smashed against the side of her skull, both objects in exchange of mass and acceleration. Brown shards flew backward like an exploding glass star. She fell to her side, silent; her face a red, swelling mess. Blood trickled down her gaping mouth into the snow, and a puddle accumulated, hot. The snow melted and gave way to escaping life force. What tears made it from my face — that did not soak my mask — fell feet away from her and planted absences in the ground.

I stood, hand tight around the neck of the bottle as though I had wrung the life out of a hen. When we moved out of the apartment, Mother told us, we’d have our own dog. Maybe even two, for them to play. I imagined every dog would smell the redolence of death about me now. Her body was still warm, but, without the maintenance of a beating heart, was gradually going colder. Frost drifted over her fur, a new white coat forming, the little brown and black fibers tipped with white.

The crushing of snow again emerged from behind, soft and light. But slower and harder than the crushing of the dog’s lithe feet. Brother was still buried in his expanding blanket.

“Turn around, Ado,” a gruff, masculine voice called out from surprisingly close by. I turned toward it, slowly. The long snout of a shotgun, its twin barrels breathing an odor of boiled eggs and copper, was inches from my face. My eyes widened into two jade targets. “Keep your hands up.” I dropped the bottle and its remaining half-carapace sank into the snow. My hands went up.

“Brother is dead,” I said through the thick covering over my face, afraid enough not to want to bring my hands toward my face.

“I’ve already lost enough of the ‘Alive’ bounty, then, I don’t see why not just bring in two corpses than waste breath on you.” He spat his words like shotgun shells through a thick, tawny beard and mustache — his eyebrows were like miniature, shaggy mustaches above his bloodshot eyes. A scar from distant times arraigned the nose of his bridge, and deep claw marks ran along the right side of his temple. From the roughness of his voice and skin, he seemed to be a man who kept his pipe close by, and from his frequent histrionics, I judged he would pull it out frequently for dramatic effect. He was a wide, barrel-chested man, a real lumberjack type; plaid flannel peeked out from the collar of his Lands’ End jacket. On warmer occasions, I had seen a thicket of chest hair peeking out from the collar of his plaid flannel.

“I’m sorry about your dog,” I replied. I really was.

“She don’t give a fuck if you’re sorry, nor I,” he spat drunkenly. The barrel pointed at me rattled. “You’re a lousy killer, not to take the credit.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew how long I’ve had to admire my own brother’s freezing corpse.”

“Sibling rivalry’s the worst, innit,” he deadpanned, eyes squinting with cold and disgust. “You and your brother’s lifeless bodies are wanted back home, courtesy of your father.” He pulled a thermos — my thermos — out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me.

“Open it and give it back,” he ordered, rattling the shotgun again, holding it a couple millimeters closer to the space between my eyebrows. “You can use your hands, miss.”

I took it and opened it. The coffee was still steaming and fragrant. Modern insulation technology is a marvel, I thought. I handed it back, and he laughed and took a deep drink. I saw his Adam’s apple bob like a fishing lure, the way it rises and falls when a fish takes the bait. Rivulets of coffee trickled down his gold beard. He lowered the end of the barrel.

“Open your mouth,” he said. He brought the thermos up to his lips again. His eyes thinned. “Open your damned mouth,” he hissed. He leaned his head back for another gulp.

I ducked and grabbed the fallen bottle and threw it at his head in one fluid motion. The shotgun went off and grazed the top of my hood. I hit the ground and he toppled backward, the thermos flying from his hand and a torrent of mahogany spilling a streak into the snow. Hot blood pooled around his head, and falling snow began to gather over his eyelids. I took a staggered breath and watched the mist gather before my face.