One step and another, ploughing her legs through knee-high drifts as the blizzard whips the air into frenzy around her head. She sees only the white before her, blurring the rest of the world, her head down as she clutches her body encased in its down jacket, holding onto the last fragments of heat as she makes her way into the unknown searching for anything other than this lifeless desert of ice and darkness.
She finds it. At first she hardly notices the twirling multitudes of light leaking from the spaces between the snow bricks as she ducks below the arch of the igloo. But as soon as she’s in, collapsing onto the packed snow inside, she does notice the two figures - animated skeletons - stood mid-dance around a revolving light ball with Queen’s ‘Radio Ga Ga’ blasting from a speaker behind them.
‘You can stay if you don’t say a word,’ says one of the skeletons, it’s jaw wobbling.
‘Okay,’ she breathes, and passes out.
Paddy Dobson
15th January 2021