Tip of the World
by Kelly Kurtzhals Geiger
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
She eased the vehicle back onto the road and noticed the dark clouds had shifted entirely to her left, to the east, she figured. A carved sign pointed toward the direct path to the Tip of the World, where the emptiness stretched into the horizon, clear and sharp.
Do not leave the road.
Maude left the road to follow the storm. She nodded to the mangled frozen fox. “You’re right, we should go this way,” she told it.
The ground rumbled beneath the vehicle’s flimsy tires that didn’t have the right kind of tread to grip the permafrost. Then, the flakes began, slowly at first, quick white drops that spattered the windshield. The snow intensified and Maude hooted back at it. She beamed at the fox. She’d done it. Two decades of back-breaking work to give the wealthy a teensy taste of the environment they’d helped annihilate and she’d finally found authentic snow, none of it piped. It was real, it existed.
She hit the brakes when the blizzard became a wall of white. She turned off the whining engine to listen to how the pattering flakes and the wild wind created an eerie loud stillness. She glanced at the dead fox and considered reclaiming her PP jacket but decided against it because she didn’t know how well blood would come out of the refurbished cloth seats. Bloodstains would undoubtedly arouse suspicion from the rental agent.
Do not exit your vehicle.
Maude unlatched the door and stepped out into the storm in just the long shirtsleeves of her cornflower blue thermal top. The wind blew her hair back into a yellow haystack behind her head, but she didn’t care this time, she just wanted a moment alone with her wall of white. The vehicle registered the outside temperature at around −10°C and so she had at least an hour, based on her body size, before hypothermia would set. She took a few steps forward and spread her arms, letting the snowflakes pelt her face and the wind dance across her face.
After what felt like a lifetime but was probably no more than twenty of the thirty minutes, Maude turned, ready to reclaim her vehicle.
It was gone.
Maude’s chest seized and pinpricks of panic rippled down her arms. The blizzard beat down. The vehicle was out there, of course it was, but Maude couldn’t see her own hand when she stuck it out in front of her. She followed her footprints that ended a few meters from where she’d stood, absorbed into the endless white blanket.
She considered spinning around but knew that’d only make it worse. She told herself to calm down and when her terror rose, realized that nobody calmed down when they were told to. She screamed. The wall of white drowned her, ignored her, didn’t give one steaming crap about her.
His leaving had felt like this feeling. She hadn’t noticed how much vacuity their apartment grew until it became so empty she could barely find herself inside of it. She’d wondered if she even left a shadow anymore.
A bird screeched overhead. A bald eagle, live in the feathered flesh, swooped through the flakes, through the whirling storm. Maude stopped screaming. She almost couldn’t believe it, that for the first time, she had been seen.
“Your boyfriend’s dead!” Maude called out to the eagle. “But you’re alive!”
She had two choices: stand still and freeze to death or walk and freeze to death. She wanted to go back toward the road, but everything looked the same. She watched the eagle’s dark stain on the sky. She followed the bird’s direction until it vanished, and she kept going.
Do not approach the ridge.
Maude approached the ridge. She trudged through the high snow, frozen fingers dug into the pockets of her loose cargos. She was really shivering now. She peered over the ledge at the jagged cliffs below, a vast pit that led to Hell or to just another vast pit, an infinity mirror of pits. She noticed the hill about fifty meters ahead that had a bare lip of land beneath its jutted escarpment. Her teeth chattered and she could no longer feel her toes.
That damn bird had steered her the wrong way. Maude wondered if it did it on purpose, retribution for Frederick, some kind of weird one-bird protest. She imagined it coming to feast on her corpse, pecking her eyes out first, slurping them down whole, one by one, like oysters. She imagined her own head mounted and stuffed, the sign beneath her severed neck announcing: Here’s What Happens When You Don’t Stay Alert in Alert.
As she made her way toward the lip, Maude had the hottest of hot flashes, or whatever it was that ripped through her. She clutched at her thermal top and felt like tearing it off, walking in her bra, which she decided against because it was a traditional full cup underwire that was ugly but practical and she didn’t want anyone to see it, not even the clouds, which had begun to take shapes like dogs and unicorns and which she couldn’t be sure weren’t actual dogs and unicorns. Maude thought about how her name was like her bra, ugly but practical, and she decided she’d like to change it for her tombstone to Mariah. She had nowhere to write it down so anyone would know. She missed the dead fox desperately.
She made it to the lip and crouched against the sharp rocks that felt soft as pillows against her back. She was vaguely aware she was hallucinating but she didn’t care, she no longer felt frightened or sad. In fact, she felt like she would never feel frightened or sad again, and it made her want to cry. The ledge in the middle of the desolate Arctic cradled her into its arms and sang her to sleep with its low, motherly croon.
* * *
Maude awoke and noticed a woman with short, cropped brown hair and soft eyes sitting in a recliner chair. The woman said a word Maude didn’t understand and held out a steaming porcelain bowl for Maude to take. The soup tasted gamey. Maude slurped it down and belched.
The woman laughed. “Qallunaat,” she said.
“Thank you,” Maude replied.
The woman went to where the PP jacket hung by a hook. She held it up and Maude shook her head, though the coat had been mostly cleaned of blood.
“No,” she said, “keep it,” though it was at least two sizes too big for the woman and the name Maude stitched on the left breast didn’t suit either of them.
She looked around the dwelling, an aluminum shotgun pre-fab with crisscrossing steel beams added for structure. A small fire glowed inside a corner stove made of wrought iron but powered by solar cells. Above the stove, a wooden rack held a swath of white fur stretched and splayed by its hands and feet. The fox, now a pelt, looked as if had been caught leaping mid-air in a joyous celebration.
The woman stood and motioned for Maude to sit up. Maude noticed when she swung her feet out from under the fur covers that they were incased in silicone bags filled with water with edges that didn’t leak. The woman replenished and resealed the warm water bags around her calves. Maude moved her bulbous toes that felt as hard as rocks and noticed her fingers for the first time, her swollen knuckles knobby with red blisters.
The woman brought two orange gloves and helped Maude pull them on. The heated thermal gloves felt like a gift from the underworld gods, and Maude’s eyelids began to feel heavy. Maude laid back down, careful to position her water socks for maximum soakage.
Days passed, and Maude learned a few new words as well as the woman’s name, Aput. Maude told Aput her name was Mariah, and Aput seemed to accept this. A few women wearing thermal jackets came in and out of Aput’s home to peer at the progress of the frostbite. Nobody stayed very long. Maude tried to give them the PP jacket. Nobody wanted it. The name Maude didn’t suit them, either.
When they left, Maude was glad to be alone with Aput again. Aput liked to watch old South Korean horror movies on a refurbished player, subtitled in Inuktitut, with English added so Maude could mostly follow along. Maude ate hot fish soup and slept in the cot and the wind howled.
Aput didn’t tell her guest how she’d found her, how sane it felt to care for someone again, how empty her home felt after Panuk had died, how she’d had enough with the sympathy from the sisters who visited. The sisters told Aput she was a fool. Qallunaat were coming to take. Aput told them it was always a foregone conclusion.
* * *
When Maude’s frostbite blisters began to turn black and peel, Aput indicated it was time for Maude to return to the outside by holding up the PP jacket, topped with a brand-new white fur-collared hood. Maude didn’t ask if she could stay, because she was afraid Aput would ask, “What good are you?” and Maude wouldn’t even understand the question much less know how to answer it.
Colorful homes dotted the open treeless landscape that butted the side of a glowering snow-covered mountain — Aput’s, as it turned out, was bright yellow on the outside. Maude hadn’t anticipated so much color.
Maude followed Aput through the path carved in the snow. Maude blinked and wondered if the cold was causing her to hallucinate again when footprints changed to tire tracks, perfect rows of white teeth. When they rounded a hill the world of the village disappeared into a parking lot of empty vehicles. Maude stared so long that when she turned back around, Aput had disappeared.
Maude moved along the rows and rows of long-abandoned silver vehicles. She found hers at the outskirts when she heard a voice behind her that didn’t belong to Aput.
“How’d you find me?” he asked. He looked entirely different than he had a year ago, though in a way he looked exactly the same.
“Technically, you just found me,” she said.
“Always with the semantics. You can’t stay. I was here first.” His red thermal jacket blotted the white mountains behind him. “I’m engineering a new pipeline. There’s no need for two pipefitters here, Maude.”
She looked into his cold blue eyes and admitted to herself that she had in fact come looking for him, had hoped he wasn’t dead but would, at the very least, apologize. She admitted to herself that she’d never thought she was good enough for him, even when she starved and pushed and pulled and prodded herself for his approval.
“I don’t need your apology or your approval to stay here,” she said. “It isn’t yours to give.”
She turned and felt his voice echo and bounce across her back. “Who said I owed you an apology?”
She let the wind absorb his words, swallow them into the vast abyss of the still terrain.
“Maude!” he shouted.
“It’s Mariah now.” She smiled. She didn’t care if he heard her. She wondered what she’d ever seen in him.
Mariah opened the vehicle’s driver side door and pulled the key fob from the rearview. She tossed the key into the cupholder and stuffed plastic Frederick into her coat pocket. Her hand brushed something papery and she pulled out the photograph and the map, artifacts from lifetimes ago. Stokes for fires, she thought, and so she returned them to her pocket and pulled up her new hood as it began to snow. The white fur felt soft against her cheek.
Copyright © 2022 by Kelly Kurtzhals Geiger
