A tiny blip in the continuum

Across the winter landscape the night train surged deeper into the heart of the country. A light fog hung in the air, rendering everything beyond the window a ghostly collage of light streaks and shadowy, transforming silhouettes.

Factories hugged the silver horizon, slumbering beasts in the harsh Northern winds, their Cubist forms cloaked in the smoke and steam bellowing from their bowels and into the grim night. Power cables rose and fell with hypnotic regularity across skeletal pylons as rays of light from road lamps danced between them in a kaleidoscopic shower of sodium vapor.

Soon we were out of the industrial town and in vast wasteland. A single road plied next to the railroad tracks, lined on the far side by an endless row of withered trees, their grizzly branches set ablaze every once in a while by the headlights of trucks hauling coal across the country.

It was to the serenity of this silent black-and-white film that I drifted into unconsciousness. Barely an hour had passed when I was awoken by the soft murmuring amongst my traveling companions. Their attention was affixed to the sight beyond the window. Once my eyes had adjusted to the near darkness, I saw what it was; it was on the roof of every house in the squalid settlement mere feet away from the tracks, and on the ground, scattered in broken coats.

Soon the calico landscape was no more and all there was left was the familiar darkness. So it was, at four in the morning and at a location unknown, that I saw snow for the first time in my life. Even as I knew it was futile, I reached out and pressed my fingertips to the window of the cabin. It was icy cold to the touch.