Tip of the World
by Kelly Kurtzhals Geiger
part 1
Tip of the World National Park
Visitors must display badges
Do not leave the road
Do not exit your vehicle
Do not disturb the wildlife
Do not approach the ridge
The night before Maude left for the Tip of the World, she dreamed all her teeth fell out. She took it as a good sign.
Between the checkpoint and the vastness, glowing red letters screamed Last Chance Before the End of the World. The words beneath it, for a Recharge, which would otherwise have clarified such an ominous message, had popped their bulbs from wind or cold. Maude took that as a good sign, too.
He had been there; he’d posted a photo of the same sign in the virtual stream. It was his last post. She knew why he’d left her; of course she knew, she saw herself in mirrors. Saw herself in comparison to advertisements blaring an expectation she’d achieved once, briefly, when she’d really tried. Femininity was exhausting, and so Maude had stopped buying into it. He obviously hadn’t; most of them didn’t. Men were visual, they were fond of saying, which made no sense to Maude, who also had eyesight.
She pulled into the empty parking lot and parked at a recharging station designed to look like a miniature snow-capped mountain range. She exited her vehicle with a grunt; it took some effort to pull her bulky body up from the low chassis. The sharp wind blew her stringy fine hair straight up like a scared cartoon character. She’d forgotten to bring a hat because she never wore hats; they made her head too hot, and she already suffered from some hot flashes she was reluctant to admit to having.
She also didn’t want to admit she was following him, not to anyone, especially not to herself. Didn’t want to admit she needed him to say the words, the coward, to tell her why, to apologize or even, upon seeing her, realize he’d made a mistake. Barring that, she needed him to be dead.
She only admitted at the surface of her thoughts that she hoped to encounter cold, real cold that wasn’t piped, though precipitation was rare in the Arctic Circle and became even rarer once everything else burned and drowned beneath it, a scorched scar of an abused planet swimming in its own blood.
Maude had fantasized about experiencing a real snowstorm all her life and, after two decades of backbreaking work crawling on bruised knees and climbing ladders and fitting pipes into rooms in ridiculous exorbitant mansions sealed off from the rest of the obliterated world, she’d finally saved enough to make the trip north.
The tourist park at the Tip of the World outside of Alert, Nunavut drew the most visitors in September, those wishing to experience the only authentic cold that remained. Some even had the good fortune of becoming lost in blizzard conditions, forced to huddle together with nothing between them and the pure featureless white landscape but the thin glass and steel of vehicles cobbled together by remaining parts from long-extinct manufacturers. Maude’s home in northern Winnipeg spent most of its time searing beneath that menace of the sky. Humans had ruined the environment, but the sun took names to finish the job.
The seaplane to Alert had been deserted because it was the second week of October, and Maude worried she was too late. Her boss hadn’t approved her time off request for September. She zipped her jacket to her neck, a lightly lined black bomber with “PP” stitched in red on the left breast. Her employers, Progress Piping, gave her one week of paid vacation. The jacket, she had to pay for it herself.
She pressed the lock button on her key fob, and the silver scrap-metal vehicle honked at her. She didn’t feel confident leaving the rental alone because she hadn’t paid for the insurance. She knew the insurance was a scam, everybody knew it, but the rental agent said, “A woman your age traveling alone ought to be protected,” so she’d refused it. But now that the vehicle — a child-sized thing, really — stood alone in the lot, she felt she couldn’t completely trust it would be there when she returned.
* * *
The bell above the creaky wooden door uttered a muffled ding, as if it was ashamed of the place it announced. The shopkeeper greeted Maude from behind a rough-hewn polished cement counter with a “howdy” and a craggled, crooked smile. The inside of the shop smelled like threads of dust, synthetic clove smoke, and the rotten-egg sulfur of a propane-powered stove.
A stuffed bald eagle glared down from the wall behind the counter. Beneath its abruptly severed neck tucked neatly into a corrugated metal plaque, the disembodied eagle wore a red banner with white lettering that warned patrons to Stay Alert in Alert! Its black glass marble eyes frowned at nothing and its yellow curved beak had been gathering rot at the edges for some time.
The toothsome shopkeeper wore a blue plastic nametag that read “Penny” on his red plaid thermal jacket, and he noticed Maude noticing the eagle. “That there’s Frederick,” Penny said, patting the eagle on the side of its white-feathered neck. “He’s our mascot. Stuffed him so he could always watch over us.”
“You plucked his eyes out,” Maude noted. “So technically, he can’t.”
Penny squinted. He couldn’t afford to correct a customer, but this one clearly had zero understanding of taxidermy and he was sorely tempted to explain it to her. But women her age, he’d learned, didn’t like being explained to. “Welcome to Alert, population forty-two. Last stop before the Tip of the World. What can we do you for? We got heavier coats than the one you got. Gets mighty cold out on that road, even in your vehicle.”
Maude couldn’t afford another coat and would’ve preferred something from one of the amber glass bottles gathering dust beneath Frederick the eagle’s warning sash instead. She decided not to ask for one because the shopkeeper would judge her, as most people judged her when she bought liquor.
“No thanks.”
“Well then, you’ll at least need a map. Virtuals don’t work too good past this station.” He gestured to the display of printed paper maps in a wire rack adjacent to the counter.
Maude ignored the maps. Instead, she pulled a printed photo out from inside her jacket pocket. Penny’s face fell with shock. Paper was more extinct than the trees it used to be fashioned from. His maps cost CA$100 for one printed sheet.
“Did you see this man? About a year ago?”
Penny took the photo into his leathery hand with knobby, arthritic knuckles. She wondered if he sold the type of pain relievers the elderly often took for such afflictions, and if she might get away with asking for some.
“Where’d you get this?” Penny asked, ignoring her question.
“How’d you kill that eagle?” she countered.
“I didn’t kill Frederick; he died of natural causes! What do you think, I’m gonna go killing a thing that used to be a symbol for something good?”
Maude sighed. She pulled one of the maps from the metal rack, the cheapest one. She didn’t need a map.
“Did you see him?”
Penny folded his arms across his scrawny chest. He pointed to another sign behind him, dark brown and rusted, nearly obscured by Frederick, who dominated the wall. It read: Don’t Ask About Nobody That’s Been Here.
Maude decided that she technically was not asking about nobody that had been there, she was asking about somebody who had. She selected a miniature plastic version of Fredrick from a bowl of plastic Fredricks next to the virtual register and put it atop the map. Penny unfolded his arms and drew up the holo display with her total: CA$225. Maude pulled her small com device from her back pocket and paid. Virtuals, it seemed, worked just fine in the gift shop.
“I seen him,” Penny said when the transaction completed. “He bought one of our best thermal jackets, a red one. He took the northwest route, caught last year’s blizzard. He didn’t come back. Sometimes people don’t stop here on their way back.”
“You couldn’t have just told me that?”
Penny shrugged. He wasn’t averse to blabbing on people, but he had bills to pay, and he figured anybody that came in search of someone who wanted to be lost was barking up a long-dead tree. Women like this one were more common a customer to Penny than she knew, which predicated his need for the sign. They always asked. The sign had more than earned its keep.
Maude stuffed the map into the left side interior pocket of her PP jacket, fixed the Frederick keychain to her rental’s fob, and exited the shop with the sad clang of the bell. She’d forgotten to ask about the pain relievers.
* * *
Outside, the wind had picked up. She took a deep breath of it. At home in Winnipeg, the air was a constant warm bath, a suffocating steam room with the tinge of primordial rot mingled with stale ball sweat because of the blasted ozone, the nuclear summer. As a pipefitter, Maude didn’t care to learn much more besides the flow of water from a source and a little bit about turbines. But like most folks, Maude knew it was the Americans’ fault. And most of them were far too dead to feel any remorse over the ruin they’d propagated.
The vehicle rumbled across the gravel drive and glided back onto the road that gave way to packed snow and ice. Maude thought she heard a bird screech, so she leaned forward to peer upward from the windshield. She saw only the amber sun licking the edges of the gathering grey clouds.. Plastic Frederick tapped against the windshield where she’d hung him and the fob from the rearview. Maude considered chucking Frederick out the window, but litterers were the worst of the worst, and Maude did not count herself among them.
Maude gazed to her left, where darker clouds rumbled. She hoped the clouds would come her way, give her that blizzard she craved. The man in her picture had found one, which made her angrier than she cared to admit, not as much because it increased the likelihood of his death but because he’d stolen her dream. At the fork, Maude took the northwest passage.
After about fifty kilometers, something dead interrupted the tundra’s void. A white fox lay flattened on the side of the road, crushed through its middle, guts splayed dark red and purple across the pure white of its body and the snow.
Maude swerved to avoid it, but the vehicle skidded on the slippery surface and hit the animal anyway. The vehicle slid onto the soft shoulder, and she heard the crunch of bones and guts. She slammed on the brakes and felt terrible, worse when she looked in her rearview to see that the small corpse had butterflied, completely massacred.
Maude had seen images of Arctic fox during her research. They were adorable white fluffy things with copper-colored eyes and sweet black button noses. She would never intentionally run one over twice with both wheels after it had already been killed in the first place. Maybe if she were drunk, but probably not.
Do not exit your vehicle.
Maude exited her vehicle to assess the damage. She peered over the corpse and made the sign of the cross. She wasn’t religious and was certain she was doing it wrong, but with nobody around to judge her, she did it anyway. The freshness of its wounds — the ones that she hadn’t inflicted — meant that she wasn’t the only visitor to drive this way recently.
She hoped the driver who’d struck it and left it there would stall out and freeze to death before ever reaching the Tip. On the bright side, she reasoned, in death this fox potentially escaped a fate that might’ve involved a shearing for fur and parts and a metal backing for a head which would always take a subordinate status to Frederick.
Do not disturb the wildlife.
Maude took off her PP jacket and wrapped what she could gather from the severed fox. The wind bit her cheeks, her hair whipped around her head like a fireworks sparkler. It felt good, refreshing, and she reasoned those hot flashes weren’t always such a disadvantage, besides their indication of the death of womanhood.
She set the still-bloody carcass on the passenger seat. She wasn’t sure what she planned on doing with it — giving it a proper burial or roasting it and eating it. Roadkill was so rare it was fair game even for those with good jobs like Maude. Her stomach rumbled, and she felt guilty, but not guilty enough to reconsider the possibility of a meat dinner.
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by Kelly Kurtzhals Geiger
