Chapter 7

Annemarie’s head hurt. She was lost. Her head was cloudy. She didn’t know whether it was from injury or fever. Everything ached. Her memories were fuzzy. Maybe she did hit her head? She did not know, but she would have to find out soon. It was cold. Snow had found its way into her clothes, but that was of no concern to her yet. As she looked up, she saw a sliver of clear sky above her. The dark blue line of the twilight sky was enframed by two dull walls of concrete. Rows of square windows stared into the street. Annemarie found herself at the bottom of this urban valley.  

     She decided to first look after herself and slowly stood up. Her limbs ached and her head throbbed again. She had a pounding headache, but she slowly stood up. She was raising herself out of a bed of snow larger than expected. She looked around again.  

     The rising sun skirted the peaks of the tall concrete building blocks. Red light bounced off the icy surface of the buildings and illuminated the valley of snow below. Light tufts of snow fell upon Annemarie.   

Annemarie searched her pockets, but the coals she put there already cooled. She wasn’t sure for how long she had been outside, but she knew that she had been here for too long. She was scared and frustrated, but she was too tired to voice her emotions. She was as drained as her coals were of warmth. She needed to move lest she wanted to freeze to the floor.  

     It was harsh moving through the frigid air, but it had also lifted the last clouds of her head. She now saw that she had lost her scarves and hat. They laid half burrowed in the snow many paces up the hillside she fell from. She remembered more.  

     “Damn you, Jack,” Annemarie thought in some corner of her mind. She was still processing what had happened. A part of her was in denial, but that wasn’t important to her right now. She was shocked and panicked and wanted to get her scarf back and go home. That was all she could do right now, and she was too tired to make more of this situation.  

     Soon she was walking up the hillside. Soon she was climbing. But before she reached her scarf the snow crumbled under her feet and hands.  

     Eventually, she gave up climbing the mountain of snow she fell from. It was too steep and every time she took a step, she dreaded the snow below her would crumble and she would fall once again.   

     Annemarie returned to the bottom of the snow valley, and she climbed the hill opposite to where she fell. As she finally stood on top of the other mountain, she saw how tall the first one was. She had been right to choose the other. It would’ve been impossible to climb it, but now she had to find another way home.   

     The sunlight reflected more and let the contours of concrete cracks crawl across the walls of the heavy buildings. She was happy for the growing illumination. Annemarie could barely differentiate between the repetitive buildings of grey. She would’ve been truly lost in the darkness of the night.   

     She turned towards her only way to go and sighed at the half grey plane in front of her. It was bathed in red, now yellow light as the sun dawned from its yearlong slumber behind clouds. There were no tracks she could follow nor signs she could read. The street markings had been buried below the masses of snow. She was at least one or two stories above ground.  

     The landscape was disheartening, but Annemarie continued. The way home was only three turns around the corner. Thus, she walked on.   

     Although she was wrapped up in clothes frost slowly crawled up to her. And she felt as if it was more than that. The old city did not care for trespassers and allowed passage to all who were audacious enough. It was a monument of failure and human negligence. The architecture spoke of willing ignorance and wastefulness. The tip of a black tower reached over the wall of buildings at the end of the street.  

     Annemarie was astonished by the size of the buildings, but also felt looked down upon. The concrete carcasses made her feel small and unimportant. She couldn’t imagine people living here but knew it to be true. She had seen pictures of a time without snow at school.   

     Maybe the city was liveable a long time ago, but now it was a snowed in ruin. Nobody cared whether its streets were passable or if it could be navigated. Annemarie turned left at the first junction she reached. She felt the slow crawl downhill until she reached the next junction. The grey buildings were identical, with heavy pillars reaching out the walls every so many windows. Annemarie soon reached the next junction, but the right was out had been buried under an avalanche of snow.  

     Annemarie hoped none of the snow on top of the buildings would fall while she was down below. She walked past the junction. She was already seeing the next one in the morning red. But the lumbering city only repeated in negligence and ignorance. Soon Annemarie had to turn right or return to the first valley. She didn’t want to give up. She hoped that her insistence would turn to success once again.   

     More ways snaked around the crumbling behemoths of concrete and junctions led to roadblocks or back to where she already had been. Annemarie should have stuck to one side of this labyrinth, but she felt that she was onto something. She wandered through the long corridors of the bleak city, slowly crawling through higher and thicker plies of snow. She wandered up sloped pathways formed by rolling snow and meltwater. She slid down sharp falls, where the snow had heaped up from the treacherous rooftops.  

     The walls were soon not only decorated crusts of ice, but long icicled grew from every edge there was. The thick layered snow on the floor slowly changed into nipping ice. The cold dry air bit hard, and deeper into her face. As Annemarie continued through the streets the hard edges of the concrete buildings were weathered by the organic outgrowth of snow and ice.  

     Annemarie was awestruck by this hidden beauty in this bleak landscape but continued to walk. This place was not built to be lived in with these gifts of nature. The scenery was driven by the clash between the heartless creations of man and nature’s answer to it. Annemarie felt fear and deference to the two powers at work.   

     A small part of her wondered again, “why would anybody build something so lacking?”