Small Framed Kim Stands at the Kitchen Sink

January 24, 2017.  Kim stood at the kitchen sink and stared at the street lights outside her second story apartment window in Barrow, Alaska.  A slight sleet hit the window and bounced off with little pings.  Her reflection blurred into the scene outside, which in turn was blurred by streams of water running down the inside of the window as inside air condensed against the cold glass.  A large pick-up made its way west on Ahkovak Street.  She could see the lights around Fred Ipalook Elementary School across the way through water beads.  But mostly she saw her own reflection--a woman alone at a sink at the top of the world.  Usually, that was a good thing.  She liked Facebooking friends back home about her far-flung life.  But right now it only depressed her.  Here she was nearly thirty, alone, staring out a steamy window.  She looked at the frozen bits of ice around the aluminum window frame--on the inside, not the outside! she thought.  She had been proud of that.  She had Facebooked photos of it.  "It's so cold, I'm growing ice inside my apartment" she had proudly written when posting the close-ups of ice clinging to the edges of glass and aluminum.  Now though, she wondered.  She wondered about it all.  Why was she here?  What was the point?  The world was sliding towards catastrophe and nobody seemed to give a damn.  Just today, she thought, Trump issued several memos to hasten the work on the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines.  Perhaps it was that she couldn't share these thoughts.  Almost everyone living on the North Slope, even the Natives, was connected to the mining or petroleum industries in some way.  Barrow was not the place for a liberal environmentalist.

 But it was more than that.  Although what could be bigger than humanity racing towards destruction while the president of the second biggest contributor of greenhouse gasses worked diligently towards increasing emissions?  Nothing was bigger than that.  She knew it.  It was her life's mission to counter that evil.  And yet it seemed like there must be more.  More than standing alone a kitchen sink at the top of the world watching little sparks of ice wander out of the night and slam their little frozen bodies against the glass pane.

Without a conscious thought about it, she shut down her mind and pulled the drain on the rinse water in the right sink.  She watched it swirl-out with a sucking sound.  Then she walked over to the cabinet by the fridge and grabbed a $9 can of pork and beans.

Ed Owens Thinks of Florida

Ely, Nevada; January 21, 2017. 

"Together, we'll make America great again," Ed Owens said the night before.  He had been sitting at the bar counter of the Jailhouse Lounge, watching the inauguration with a couple of friends.  When he woke up he wasn't so sure of things.  He wasn't so sure of anything in the mornings, especially winter mornings.  He hated waking up to a cold house and the heavy smell of coal.  His house was an old house, a small house, along the railroad tracks.  It had no central heating.  He could have fixed that.  He could fix anything.  Except, perhaps his life.  Nothing was quite the same since Mildred had died.  There was no reason to install a furnace since then.  He had his routine.  His quiet places outside the house.  This place was simply a place to drop his head at night.  But he should have fixed the furnace for Mildred.  He couldn't imagine why he hadn't.  That had been thoughtless.  Now it was payback time.  Karma was kicking butt as some new age hippie would put it.  He looked around the room in the gray dawn from beneath the dingy pink quilt that Mildred had made long ago.  Why he was awake, he didn't know.  There was the cold and the heavy smell of coal.

He returned home from the Jailhouse Casino late.  He had convinced Dora, the bar tender, to join in and have a drink while she was on the job.  There was just the four of them--Jack Peters, Bill Mitchell, Dora and he--but they'd had a good time celebrating a new America.  Too good of a time.  His head hurt.  His bones ached, and because of that damn coal stove, his lungs hurt too.  He coughed in the early morning light.

Outside it was 10 degrees.  A thin smokey fog settled in the black rock neck of the canyon on Ely's west side. The top of the five story historic Hotel Nevada poked above it.  The lights from the giant miner on the Nevada Club lit up the dry fog as did the much brighter blue and pink neon from the Jailhouse Casino across the street.  The streetlights were still on and lit up the all but empty Highway 50.  A few stars could still be seen in the west.  Looking east, a white light slowly spread above the Shell Creek Range.  Beyond that was Spring Valley, the Snake Range, the Snake Valley, the Confusion Range, the House Range, the Pahvaunt Valley--187 miles to 1-15 in Utah, 187 miles of near nothingness.  If you were to go west, towards Fallen, it was even further, 257 miles of emptiness on this, the "loneliest highway in America".

Of course, just because it was the official loneliest highway in America didn't make it so.  There are no absolutes.  There were lonelier highways.  There were more remote places.  Colder places.  The wilds of Alaska.  Antarctica.  The moon.  And Pluto.

But that January morning, lying in bed with a hang-over, under a smoky decaying pink quilt created by his dead wife years ago, Ed Owens felt Ely, Nevada was cold enough and remote enough for anybody, even a recluse, western, old-time miner like himself.

He had a son in Florida.  It was a thought.

2017: Natasha Babbitt Turns on the Lamp to Confirm What She Thought She Saw in the Murky Light

Dear.  I'm dead.  I should have listened to you.  It is dangerous to suck on Halls Cool Berry Breezers in bed after all.  Who would have thought?  They're small, slippery and melt; you'd think they'd be safe.  Anyway, I'm sorry I didn't listen.  I didn't fall asleep though.  I was sitting up, like you always told me.  Anyway, it's not my time yet.  Wake up, you have to save me.

So ended the dream of Natasha Babbitt at 5:42 a.m., January 6, 2017.  Her eyes shot open.  The blurry bedroom came into focus.  She saw what she knew was her bright green sweater dangling over the edge of her dresser.  That bothered her.  She should have folded it up and put it away.  She started to think about how bold it was of her to wear spring colors in the dead of winter, when "Wake up, you have to save me," repeated in her brain.  She had a brief war with the heavy winter comforter, flipped over, and found Bruce in the gray dawn, laying lifeless beside her, a stream of drool flowing out of the open breathless cave of his mouth and pooling on the pillow beside her.

She reached over him and turned on the lamp to confirm what she thought she saw in the murky light.

She screamed the confirmation.