A Wrinkle In Time

The wind was whistling around him and slapping him at a relentless pace. It began to chafe away at his nose and lips as he trekked forth. He lifted his hand over his mouth and sighed as he looked ahead of him to see that this storm was not slowing down in the least. He stuck his right hand into the pocket of his thin jacket and pulled out a small bottle of McCormick vodka. As he twisted the cap off and took a considerable gulp, he heard heavy footsteps approaching behind him.

Matthew turned around to see nothing to match the sounds he thought he heard. He shrugged it off and continued through the snowy abyss. Wiping his lips clean of the crust that had built up from the wind, he again heard massive footprints. He dropped the bottle into the snow and, as he turned his body around to face this anonymous source, he thought he was envisioning a mirage.

An old woman, wrinkled from her forehead to her chin stepped towards him. She stopped as she met with him face to face, and pointed her cane directly to his face.

“You. You know what you’ve done, don’t you? The misery you’ve caused just by being who you are? Come with me.”

“No,” he said defiantly, “I will not go with you. You think a couple words are gonna make me trust you? Get the fuck outta here.”

“As you wish,” she said as she disappeared where she stood, dissipating into a cloud of blue dust. Matthew ran his hands down his forehead over his eyes, shaking his head to determine whether what he saw was true to life. With the bottle of vodka still in his hand, he took another sip before dropping to his knees, laughing in the face of the storm that threatened his life. The skin that lay beneath his thin cotton jacket offered no protection from the fierce predicament he found himself in. He imagined that this must be what the ice age felt like, lonely and cold, awaiting the final kiss from the reaper’s lips.

Matthew began to dig a hole to crawl in to with hopes of sheltering himself from the cold. Using his bare hands until they turned a dark shade of pink, he shoveled the snow in various directions around him. He reached into his coat to take another sip of the bottle, and let out a regretful, “fuck” upon realizing that it was no longer in his possession.

He had a decision to make, and not much time to make it in. He figured that if he were to dig up the bottle, it would provide body warmth and prove to be more beneficial than the potential tomb he was digging. On the flip side, he knew from his father’s experience in the armed forces that you could survive the intense weather with the proper preparation.

Matthew sat down on the cold, wet ground and folded his legs Indian style while pounding his fist into the snow. He shouted at the sky and damned whichever God may have wished this to be. He got up out of his crouch and again tossed away the snow without gloves on. As he continued to dig away, he looked around to see the mountain of snow that he had brushed aside.

Either a big chunk of time passed while he attempted to burrow his way to the now missing vodka, or there was more snow than he initially thought. No matter the scenario, he determined it was high time for a breather. He wrapped his arms around his head and curled into the fetal position, attempting to thwart off Mother Nature’s vicious side.

Suddenly, the wind calmed, the wintery mix stopped swirling, and the snow melted from under him. As winter evaporated and gave birth to the summer scene that he left behind from the previous night’s rest, he heard a voice behind him. The old woman approached him, baring a wooden club that shined once the light touched it. Before he could ask what she wanted this time, he was cracked in the head with the slab of wood and dragged across the dirt.

The woman reached a cave and rolled him inside before entering it herself. She stood over him and clutched a wooden bowl and mixed a concoction of paste and water with a brown wooden spoon. She dumped a bit of water on his face to bring him back to consciousness. He gasped and wiped his eyes before looking in hers.

“Where am I?” he asked her, still groggy from the blow to the head.

She laughed before answering him.

“Exactly where you should be, my child.”