The Woman who Froze the World

The world was still.  There was no breeze, no breath, no being.  Half was swathed in sunshine, each photon suspended in their path to the ground, which in turn had dust particles stagnant, unaffected by gravity’s pull.  The other languished in darkness, no way to resolve the night.  The water droplets in the clouds were thwarted, mid cycle.  An entire planet completely devoid of life, of movement, of progression.

Except for her.  The woman who froze the world.

She was currently wandering in the night, unceremoniously dragging her cargo behind her, the wheels clattering on each cobble of the shambled street.  Blocking her path were various revellers who had long since stopped their merriment and intoxication.

A man stood nearby, his head snapped back with the last dregs of a cheap larger on an eternal passage to his throat.  His face was ludicrously contorted with a concentration suggesting this was not the first bottle he had chugged that night.  At first such funny sights of suspended people had made her laugh.  She even contemplated taking a photo to document the experience until came the crushing realisation that her eyes were the only ones which would take in the sight.

In a corner, a young woman was in the middle of expelling her evening’s excesses.  The woman who froze the world’s body gave an inexplicable convulsion of revulsion at the sight, a mechanised reaction brought on by only the visual sense.  Smell was not really an issue in this place.

She looked back again at her load, lying relaxed in his luxuriously cushioned litter which started life as a boat trailer, and smiled at her beloved.  Her face muscles strained at the effort as they were no longer accustomed to expressing emotion when no one would see.

“Well, we’ve made it” she said, wondering if the sound she heard was just in her head or actually reverberated through the void.  They had made it to the centre of Edinburgh which was number thirty four on their list of fifty places to visit.  The list was made with great vigour after they had shared two bottles of prosecco and a four seasons pizza.  They had managed to visit eight in life, or the life that they were both aware of, and she was continuing the tradition so they passed through the landscape and even across the seas in search of their next landmark.

Before, she would have scoffed at the idle life of a traveller, taking everything in and giving nothing back, but she was acutely aware that her current predicament did not require a mortgage, job or other form of occupational burden.  She was living on her whim for the first time ever, how he would have affectionately laughed, his brown eyes crinkling at the corners, at how she had changed.  However, she noted, she was still basing her activities on a list so, perhaps, had not altered her soul quite as much as she would have liked to admit.  In order to rectify this thought, she changed the hats of the two people stood in the queue for the pub.  One, a cowboy hat labelled with the same cheap Australian larger that the bottle guzzler was consuming.  The other was a more angular affair and had been precisely placed to embrace a diagonal dissection of his head.  The window behind them reflected the original headwear arrangement and she would not appear in this reflection, nor any.  She could wander around her world as a ghost, like the monster from all of those films that they would snuggle up to on the couch, pretending to be far more frightened than they actually were.  She stood back and considered with satisfaction her hat-swapping-handiwork.  Such anarchy!

In her impetuous moment, she had gotten closer to her beloved than she had realised, far, far closer than she had ever intended to.  She knew, in spite of the fact that she could not see it, that under the new clothes she scavenged for him was the wound that she had caused.  But worse than the knowledge of the betrayal beneath his garments was that, in the half light of the street lamp, she was now close enough to see that those deep brown eyes, usually joyful, were shock, pain and reprobation.  She closed her eyes, her whole body shaking and a compression so violent on her heart that it might as well have been her who had a knife in her heart, not him.  In the stillness of the world echoed an argument from so long ago to her, a snapping of her senses and then…silence.

And then it passed.  She stood back, eyes still closed, and was then far enough away from his judgement that she could resume her existence.  They would continue.  The woman who froze the world and her beloved, following their adventures list until it was no more.  What came after the list, she was not sure.  She would die eventually, she thought, as in the years since everything stopped she was aware that she was ageing.  Her body was living the span that it was designed to rather than resisting the arrow of time like everything else.  With no mirrors it was hard to view the ageing façade but she felt the physical symptoms.  Their globe-trotting was becoming less efficient.

In the end she was grateful.  She would accept and revel in her purgatory.  In that moment of insanity and violence she had only one thought pulsing through her entirety and she had been granted her all-encompassing desire.

The woman who froze the world and her beloved together.  Always.