A Winter's Day

a winter's day
by stacy carolan

“Look,” said Mark, bending down. Then the explosion.
         Roy was launched backwards into the air, towards the hill. It really wasn’t much of a hill, nothing more than a mound, but to them it had been Kilimanjaro, it had been K-2, it had been Everest itself. They had been explorers caught in a sudden avalanche, racing at breakneck speed down the rocky face of Pike’s Peak, laughing all the way down.
         Roy’s breath plumed in front of him as he cut through the air, then out in a great puff as the small hill caught him. He couldn’t hear the wind anymore. He couldn’t understand why his face was wet. He couldn’t see Mark.
         He sat up. There was no pain, but he felt as though there should be. He was scared to stand.
         A hole had appeared in the ground. Chunks of dirt speckled the snow, large chunks nearest the hole, smaller chunks farther out. Like gravity, thought Roy. The size of the chunks is directly proportional to the distance from the hole. Or is it indirectly...
         He looked around. The soldiers would come soon. They would have heard the explosion. They hadn’t been far away.
         Mark had wanted to sneak, like secret agents, behind the small band of armed men clustered around the barrel for warmth. One soldier had seen them. Mark had been intent on avoiding dry twigs and ice-hardened leaves, but Roy had seen the soldier. Roy had smiled and put a finger to his lips, then pointed to his little brother and shrugged, feeling very wise and much older than eleven. The soldier had returned the smile, and even winked, before turning his face back towards the fire, and Special Agent Mark had eluded capture once again.
         Roy’s face was warm. And he still couldn’t see Mark.
         Indirectly proportional, he thought. I think gravity is indirectly proportional. I’ll look it up when I get home, though.
         One chunk of dirt nearest the hole looked like a boot. In the summers, he and Mark liked to find shapes in the clouds. Once Roy had seen a boot. Mark had said it was a strongman’s elbow. Mark always had to be different. But Roy thought even Mark would have to agree that that particular chunk of dirt looked remarkably like a small boot.
         Roy craned his neck around (slowly, trying to move nothing but his head, alert for any sign of injury), and there was the soldier that had smiled at him. He was not smiling now. His gun was raised to his shoulder, his eyes wide and ready and moving quickly over the trees. He saw Roy and motioned him to stay down. Roy nodded and leaned back against the mound.
         He was staring up at the clouds. There were no individual fluffs to decode today, just a steel-grey blanket from horizon to horizon. It looked like the ocean. Roy could imagine he was a bird, a seagull, looking down on the waves of the Atlantic.
         A faint shadow touched the top of Roy’s head. He rolled his eyes back and tilted his chin up and saw the soldier. The soldier said something, but there was no sound, just a gauzy white puff of breath. Despite that (and the fact that he didn’t speak the soldier’s language in the first place), he could guess what the soldier was saying. “I don’t know where he is,” he replied. He couldn’t even hear his own voice in his head.
         The soldier walked around the small hill and stopped. Roy sat up. The soldier was staring at the crater and the boot-shaped clump of dirt. Roy couldn’t see the soldier’s breath anymore.
         “Sir?” he said. He could feel his throat vibrate, but still could not hear the sound.
         The soldier jumped. He looked at Roy, and his breath came rushing out in a cloud. He looked warily at the ground, then stepped close to Roy and knelt down, laying his gun aside. He looked over Roy’s face. The moisture there was cold now. The soldier pulled off his mittens (the right one had a hole cut out for his trigger finger), then pulled off one of his liner gloves and wiped Roy’s face with it. The moisture had no color on the black material. The soldier leaned over and, with his gloved hand, gathered a clump of snow, skimming it off the top, avoiding ground level. He spoke.
         “I don't understand you,” said Roy. He might have been yelling, but he wasn’t sure.
         The soldier spoke again. His forehead wrinkled, like Mark’s did when he was concentrating very hard.
         “And I can’t hear you.” He might have spoken this more quietly. Was he deaf now? Would he have to learn to adjust the volume of his voice by the vibration in his throat?
         This time when the soldier spoke, his mouth moved very deliberately. And Roy thought he could understand some of the words being shaped by the soldier’s lips. One of them was “eyes.” And “very cold.” And he was making circular gestures at his own face, then pointing to Roy.
         “You want to wash my face with snow?”
         The soldier nodded.
         “And I should close my eyes?”
         The soldier nodded, and smiled a strange smile, one in which the corners of his mouth didn’t rise.
         Roy nodded and closed his eyes, steeling himself for the shock of the cold snow. But it wasn’t that bad. The soldier rubbed the snow all over his face, as though he were painting. Then he wiped the snow away with the liner glove. He rubbed very hard, but Roy’s skin had numbed.
         The gloved hand paused over his closed eyes. Roy sensed a quick motion in the soldier’s body, then the hand was removed. He opened his eyes. The soldier had thrown the clump of snow away and was pulling his mittens on over bare hands. The liners lay in the snow.
         “Where’s my brother?” Roy asked.
         The soldier looked at him. He looked very young just then, looked not much older than Roy, in fact.
         He spoke. Roy thought he recognized the word he saw on the soldier’s lips, but didn’t understand it. The soldier appeared to say “instead.” Roy thought perhaps the soldier’s grasp of other languages wasn’t that good.
         “Instead of what?” he asked.
         The soldier closed his eyes and turned his head. After a moment he opened his eyes and put a finger to his lips, just like Roy had done near the barrel fire. Roy didn’t understand this either, but nodded anyway.
         The soldier leaned forward and slid a hand behind Roy’s neck. He pulled him up to a sitting position, then slid his other arm under Roy’s buttocks and hoisted him easily up over his shoulder. Like a sack of potatoes, Roy thought. Mark loves to be carried like this, for some reason. He calls it the “sack of potatoes.” Pretty soon he’ll be too big for me to carry. Mom says he’s going to be big, like Dad was. Maybe Mark will be a soldier too.
         The soldier had picked up his rifle and was walking back the way he had come, sliding his boots carefully into his previous footprints. Roy lifted his head just in time to see the crater disappear behind the small hill (Kilimanjaro, K-2, Everest), and caught a brief glimpse of the boot-shaped clump of dirt. From his new vantage point, it could have been anything.