I can’t get it out of my head.
The jaws.
The brilliant whiteness.
I know the police said everything collapsed because of all the snow on the roof, but I was there. I saw it, and it damn well wasn’t just snow. It was what the snow had become, coming down, sweeping in, hour after hour
in what the weather lady had said was the blizzard of the century.
Of course, it happened the day of my twelve-hour shift, and, “We can’t close the pharmacy, now can we?” my boss had said, no doubt from the warmth of his living room while I stood outside, sweating after already having cleared the driveway, watching it turn white again while we talked. “Think of all those people who need necessities. Water, diapers, potato chips,” he encouraged me. “We need to stay open for them. We’re like a hospital.”
One definite strike against me: I lived nearby.
I didn’t say anything. “Maybe we can let you end a little early,” he suggested, to fill the ensuing silence. “How’s half an hour sound?”
Spending eleven and a half hours alone at work on the day of the blizzard of the century did not sound good. “Fine,” I said, realizing strike two: I was a pushover.
“Fantastic.”
A plow drove by, dumping snow back onto the driveway. Fuck…
Then I dropped my phone in the snow.
Fuck!
After clearing a path to the street, I got into my dad’s truck and checked my phone. Some moisture had gotten in behind the camera lens, but the phone itself still worked.
I reversed out of the driveway and rolled along my usual route to work, albeit this morning through whiteout conditions dotted by the occasional car: stuck in the snow, fish-tailed onto the unplowed shoulder, sitting empty in front of houses where other people were spending their unexpected days off…
I arrived slowly but without incident.
The pharmacy where I worked, Quint’s Rx, was one of about fifty stores enclosing a big square parking lot, which together with the stores made up our local Amityhill Mall.
It was nothing special (“the mall”) and no less so today, except for its eerie and vast emptiness. Not that I had expected anything else. Only madmen and retail workers could be expected to brave today’s roads to get to the fucking mall.
I parked, shielded my face with my arm and crossed from the truck to the pharmacy’s entrance, where I fiddled using freezing fingers with the lock and key until I heard the satisfying click, and I was in.
At least the interior was cozy, and after I’d shut the door behind me—quiet.
Even being outside for a minute in the openness of the parking lot, where the wind had space to rush and howl, had filled me with a certain unease, a desire for shelter and an imagined fear of being homeless, of being alone, forced to brave the violent outdoors without the help of civilization…
Although I didn’t expect many customers, I went through my usual opening routine, before taking a seat near the wall of windows facing the parking lot. Usually, I could easily make out the grocery store directly across from Quint’s Rx, and sometimes even the water tower in the far distance behind it, but this morning the space between the two sides of the mall’s square appeared white and infinite, like an endless sea. Even the blowing snow seemed unnaturally still, as if it had stopped, each snowflake frozen in place by the snapping of the thread of time, and if not for the sensation of my own rising-and-falling breath and the muted howl of the wind, I could have been fooled into believing the snowfall had metamorphosed into a milky, coastal fog.
Every once in a while a car drove past, shattering the hypnotic monotony, flickering in and out of existence in the enveloping blizzard, but no people appeared, and for a moment I lost myself in a world without people, thinking, What am I going to do with my life? What purpose does—
That’s when I first saw it:
The wind must have shifted, and in its shifting had momentarily cleared away a view of the sky, a faint blue distinct from the pure white of snow, and into this view—white, monstrous and against it—did the beast rise, formed as if from the snow itself, emerging from the parking lot, and leaping into the air:
A shark!
A shark made of winter, with eyes the color of hideous sunset and teeth of the most crystalline ice!
It hung above—
As fear gripped my heart, fear of its unnaturalness and its realness, for even as my mind flipped through rational explanation after rational explanation; hallucination, pareidolia, mirage, boredom and imagination; I knew this was no phantom, no conjuration of my mind, but objective truth: a monster of unlimited appetite which longed to feast on love and warmth and summer.
—and when it crashed back down to the parking lot:
the wind screamed;
and all the windows in the pharmacy shattered, first spider-webbing with cracks, then bursting, a shower of glass and ice; and winter, the full force of winter!
I ran for the safety of the nearest wall.
Winter followed.
I fumbled for my phone.
I had to call someone. To report the damage, to—
No signal.
And through the vacant windows I saw the beast again, this time closer and angled toward me, its glacial dorsal fin cutting diagonally across the parking lot, the churning of the blizzard, and I fumbled once more for my phone, now to capture the madness unfolding before me, the ceaseless din, the menace of the approaching shark, whose body, though still hidden beneath the surface of the parking lot, would in seconds emerge—must emerge—as head and maw and teeth…
I stood my ground,
tightly holding my phone,
recording,
despite my fraying nerves, despite the snow lashing my face, with arms unsure but mind made up, on cold legs stable enough that as the beast finally—mercifully—lifted its head, opening its massive jaws, and rose—
I waited until the last moment before diving away—
Turning onto my back:
I saw it soar above Quint’s Rx, larger than any creature I’d ever seen, before, in most-glorious descent, it smashed the pharmacy and I was crawling, stumbling forward through where the entrance had once been, as around me the blizzard raged thick as honey and dense as handknit wool, scratching at my throat, my eyes, my soul. But I couldn’t stop. I knew I couldn’t stop, for the beast was surely behind me.
To say I walked through the unrelenting blizzard would be wrong.
I pushed through it.
A liquid world of icy pin pricks.
A hideous, featureless snowglobe which a malevolent god had shaken and set down, trapping me inside; me and it,
following—I didn’t even have to look back to know—and as soon as it had feasted sufficiently on the pharmacy, it would come for my own flesh.
But it did not:
Instead, I heard somewhere far off the creaking of steel and collapsing of brick, and when I glanced to my right, I spied with squinting eyes the destruction of another store, then another, and another in rapid succession.
I caught only glimpses of its powerful jaws,
opening:
consuming the entire mall,
store by store,
leaving nothing standing, as it prowled along the parking lot coast, intent on devouring every last trace of commerce, returning its natural hunting grounds to a state of primordial cleanliness. All that would be left were bones: weekly flyers and unwound screws, plastic shards and worthless money, and broken medals for will-never-be-again employees of the month.
I stopped, dropped my arms and looked.
I was still holding my phone, but there was nothing more to film. All around me was whiteness, complete and unadulterated, a world of cosmic dust that smelled of laundry detergent and tasted of chemical purity.
Directionless.
Aimless.
Where in the mall parking lot am I?
On what world am I?
There were only I and it, and once it had circumnavigated our planet—it returned—
like a horrible angel lunging at me with jaws apart from a sky the color of the waters the color of the asphalt the color of the very essence of existence, for you are snow, and to snow you shall return. For you are snow, and to snow you shall return. The avalanche, the weight…
It ate me.
I swear to you, it ate me, for you are snow,
and to snow you shall return.”
“What’s that?” I heard a man’s voice say. “I think I heard something.”
I was immobilized.
Cold.
Buried in the aftermath of—
“There,” the voice said, and suddenly the sky appeared, then arms were thrust beside my body. A policeman’s face. I was pulled toward it, coughing. My arms were freed, so I rubbed my fingers into my eyes. The blur became sharpness. “There you are, son. You OK?”
I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. Coughing.
I was:
I was in the mall parking lot. The sky was blue and the sun was out, but there was too much snow everywhere. I remembered the beast coming down upon me.
I was near the grocery store but there was no grocery store.
Only ruins, garbage.
Cracked containers of cleaning products. Broken bottles of mouthwash. An empty yellow cardboard box of Sunshine.
“You’re lucky we found you,” the policeman said.
“What about the shark?”
Fear still echoed in my hollow chest.
“The what now?”
I pointed at the destruction on all sides of us. The entire mall had been flattened. Not one store stood.
“That there’s what you call the consequence of an accumulation of too much snow on the roof,” the policeman said. “Buildings ain’t built to withstand that much pressure, not here, and no surprise, given we haven’t been dumped on like this since forever.”
“It wasn’t snow on the roof,” I said. “It was a monster—”
“of a storm, indeed. And once the first went, so went the others, like dominos.” He smiled. “I’m sure that’s what you’ll tell us at the station.”
It was what I told them.
“There,” they said, once I’d signed the statement. “That’ll be plenty good for the insurance purposes so we can get the mall rebuilt.”
But it’s not what I’m telling you.
It’s not what I believe, or what I saw happen.
Maybe our mall collapse will even make the news somewhere (“Small Town Mall Destroyed by Blizzard of the Century”), but if it does, and you come across it, you certainly won’t be any closer to the truth than if you’d never come across it at all. I was there, and the monster was there, and anything less is but a fairy tale.
As for my phone, I still have it, but all the videos I took are too bleary to make out. Nonetheless, sometimes I watch them, and when I do, my blood runs cold.