The blizzard does little to conceal a distant spectacle. A plane alight with fire careens towards the glaciers outside of Valor Station.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfgtmrpB1BX
I lurch out of my chair with enough force to send it clattering to the ground. Across from me, Michelle Kuntz, the meteorologist, peers up from our game of chess to inspect my status, and then she follows my eyes out the window to our right. When she sees the plane too, her chair smashes the floor alongside mine.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡg6ZqVUYmnH
The snowstorm at the South Pole has been raging for days at this point. Blind monotony had characterized the station for a week—the astrologist could not see the stars, and the climatologist could not monitor the ice caps. A storm of such magnitude should have surely prevented any plane from venturing to Valor Station. The winds likely raged at 180 miles per hour for days on end. How had the pilots even gained the clearance to take off from the tiny King George Island airport?113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ638JagbecC
I round my eyes towards Michelle. When she first discovered the squall, she mentioned sending word back to Valor Airport on King George that the supply plane would need to be delayed. How then is there a plane flaming in the distance, miles out from our shared window on Valor Station?113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡc8TICjEvq9
Michelle matches my gaze. Her brows furrow and she raises her shoulders an inch above their resting position. A shrug. She’s as befuddled as I am.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡu0QsIbpXAy
I turn my head to inspect the Antarctic wilderness once more, and what stretches before me is a long, barren stretch of land so flat that I can see the earth’s curve from the Valor Station hallway. In the middle of my field of vision, the plane decisively connects with the ground. A fiery hearth rises from the impact point, and smoke immediately soars towards the sky in a broad plume, interrupted only by howling gales and coarse snow.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTvgaeEKRf2
“That can’t be good,” I say. My words are an understatement and Michelle says as much.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnpBSzy9Tmu
“You’re telling me.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5B1Hi1wR5C
Footsteps surge behind me in the hallway, muffled steps against the newly installed carpet. I turn to find Victor Pélissier, the wintering doctor. He’s looking out the same window as I am with concern etched deep into his features. The emotion spontaneously generates wrinkles on his youthful forehead, and crows feet surge from the corners of his hickory eyes. I follow his eyes back to the crash. “Do you think anyone survived?”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbCanY8VxKD
How nonchalant to be speaking of death as if it is a hurdle with which to leap over. I have seen death, and Victor has too; the only difference is that Victor feels passionate about salvaging those he can. The mark of a good doctor, I think. And the mark of somebody that will care too much when a situation calls for detachment.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRUgCXJkLzc
As for crash survivors, Victor narrows his eyes. “I don’t know,” he murmurs. “But we should try to save who we can. That plane contained supplies for the Winter.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTSWDsiDwMy
I return to Victor’s face. “Let me come.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡz3Cz8mnO9z
He tilts his head to the side, though his eyes remain on the distant crash site. “Alright,” he relents after a moment spent in silent thought. “Get some gear on. I’ll get a Sno-Cat up, maybe grab a few station security members.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMtZbm9wRsb
Victor then leaves. He’s fleet-footed, perhaps inspired by real danger imposed onto hypothetical survivors, and he moves with a swiftness I could only imagine. Even though I’ve been given instructions from a man both older than me and wiser, I take a moment to linger. I turn back to the window, looking out of Valor Station, and I catch Michelle’s face in the corners of my eyes.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVvQKKxXBmN
Or perhaps the lack of her face. She’s pressed her palms into her eyes, and her knees have become so weak that she stumbles back and away from the window. Her heel catches on an errant chair leg, and she tumbles to the ground, all while moaning into her hands. She says something, but as her lips press into her arms, she’s unintelligible.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡU0y2KpVJd5
I’ve never been good at comforting other people. From an early age, I was a chronic self-soother, so the best of my understanding boils down to patting myself on the back when tears threaten to fall from my eyes. However, with Michelle in such dire straits, I know I must do something for her, no matter my personal reservations. I navigate around our chess table, disturbing the pieces, and I kneel down alongside Michelle’s grieving form. I place my hand on her shoulder and gently pry her hand away from her face with my other palm. Given ample opportunity to do so, she raises her tear-streaked eyes to look me directly in the eyes, expectant.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6jgM0JF9MK
It’s only now that I realize that I didn’t prepare anything to say. In the absence of a proper plan, and I blurt out the only words in my heart.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJa3quQ5Hop
“It isn’t your fault.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRMfyFYhC1s
Her face twists. “I tried to warn them,” Michelle sobs. “I told the airport about the blizzard, but they didn’t respond. I should have waited for them to confirm. I should have just waited.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwzPVCi4NQ3
Her voice breaks and her chest stutters as another sob, robust and firm, crosses her lungs. I dig my fingertips further into her shoulder in a desperate bid to return her to the land of logic and reason. “And it’s likely they never would have confirmed, Michelle,” I tell her. “What then? Valor would have already sent the plane by the time we could have had the satellite link repaired. You couldn’t have done anything differently.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWkmnTYtkBk
My words are nothing more than mallets against her heart, sealed up from beneath and stopped from the top. I wish to stay with her further, to indicate that everything would work out alright, but I’ve already told Victor that I would be on the expedition towards the wreckage. The least I can do is check on her later when the flames have settled and when we have retrieved the supplies. Though reluctant, I rise to my feet, and my hand drifts from Michelle’s heaving shoulder.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3jfSzxv2kd
“I’m going to go to the crash site,” I tell her. “I’ll be back. Keep it together, okay?”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1neUmlLhZS
Michelle doesn’t respond. I don’t expect her to. She’s trying to find words when her mind is made of tangled yarn. She’s not only preemptively coping with the death of strangers, but she’s also attempting to navigate the guilt of indirectly causing those deaths. Word simply cannot compare to feelings in those moments.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeGSOW0kv76
So I escape her energy. I walk the opposite direction down the Valor Station hallway, and I pass by scattered glass windows as I traverse the long, curved corridor. Each aperture offers prime viewing to the smoldering remains of the supply plane in the distance, frosted over with snow and ice in each corner. At some point, I grow so weary of watching the smoke rise that I turn my head and block out my peripheral vision so that I no longer need to witness tragedy in its most accurate form. I’ve had enough tragedy for one life, and I need no more than what I have already been prescribed by fate. Even so, the windows continue to leer at me. At moments such as these, I pray that my station-assigned room had been closer to the interior.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgF4wMUoH72
My prayers aren’t answered, of course. I lost faith in God a long time ago, and not even his imagined power could shift building layouts within mere moments. In a matter of time, I finally reach my dorm. It’s a single black door nestled among a spiderweb of others, each dorm looking out to the window-lined hallway that now seeks to plague me through this life and the next. I twist the doorknob, and I escape the corridor for good.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIQNEQ56DQs
My dorm is insipid, much to my chagrin. I’m the type of woman to spend more time decorating my room than living in it; I figure that if a space is to be safe for me, it must closely resemble my mind so I might drift away into my own headspace whenever I enter. In New York City, this often manifested as walls covered in posters from heavy metal bands more popular with a younger generation than a woman my age. In comparison to my tiny apartment in Manhattan, my room on Valor Station is mind-numbingly dull. All neutral colors, rounded corners, and generic furniture constructed from department stores littering the United States.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡb6TIy5pUNc
It used to bother me. Maybe it still does. A week ago, I got into this room on the second-to-last plane to Valor Station, and I looked around my assigned dorm like I was looking at garbage. There was no flavor, and there still isn’t, because decorating living spaces is secondary to ensuring survival in Antarctica. Now, however, I welcome how dull the room is because at least it isn’t on fire like the lonely plane a mile out from the station. It could have done with a few posters, some fairy lights, but as it is now, it’s more comforting than usual.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbgPNpdYuFU
I strip in the mirror. I peel black casual clothing from my body layer after layer until I’m in nothing more than underclothes, and then I tear away my underwear in turn. Then I pull on woolen underwear around my legs and a long-sleeved undershirt atop that. Further on, two polyester jackets and a zip-up fleece sweater to match my fleece trousers and moleskin paths. Finally, the outer layer; an orange, wind-proof parka, similarly colored wind-proof pants, a balaclava, and a wool hat made of darkened tones and puffy tassels. All that’s left to complete my outfit for the Antarctic cold are my mittens, black polyester cocoons insulated from within, although I leave them hanging from my parka’s pockets, for the time being, so I don’t sacrifice dexterity before venturing into the blizzard.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfxmOL726U1
Therefore, the only body part left open to the air beside my hands are my eyes, deep and brown, staring into my mirror with such a disjointed quality that I can hardly quantify them as my own. I am a stranger to myself, just I have been for the past nineteen years.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2qvRwUGtcf
I can’t bear to look at myself any longer. I turn from the mirror and resist the temptation to break it for its folly, and I exit my room in turn.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbHCLFoBCog
Back in the hallway, I traverse the long corridor just as I had before. I pass the long line of rooms, then the chess table I had sat at with Michelle twenty minutes ago. Though the overturned chairs remain, Michelle is missing. My first instinct is to search for her to ensure she hasn’t done anything drastic, but duty wins again. I pass the chess table without incident and then approach the stairs further down the hallway. With my hand on the railing, I descend the curling steps into the garage in the facility’s basement.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3U7ij0cxwK
In the garage, Victor has already prepared a Sno-Cat for our journey. He stands next to the massive, humming piece of automobile genius, dwarfed and made a blob by the same facility-issued orange parka that I wear. Alongside the Sno-Cat is Esther Kahn, head of Station Security, and her two underlings, Leo Gallagher and Samuel Atkinson. I gulp upon recognizing them. I’m the last one to enter the garage, and Esther ensures that I know.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZnN7TKvrpI
“Gwen's here,” the brunette announces as I clear the final stairstep. “Let’s move.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiEhAQJ2wlR
I offer an apologetic smile. “Sorry.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvuqQFME72N
I get no response, though this does not surprise me. I am never usually dignified with a reaction on the base, especially not by Esther and her crew. Esther’s installment on Valor Station as head of Security was a point of contention, especially when the head of Project Valor revealed that all members of Station Security would be allowed firearms. From what I know, the only guess I can muster as to why Esther might be so hostile towards my presence is simply a matter of publicity. I am a direct link to the outside world, and anything she says can be used against her in the media.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlSfIHzGxJq
Perhaps her suspicions are warranted after all. I never was above blackmail when it came to investigating the news in New York City.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHORnd6WmAj
When Victor spots me, he motions the rest of the crew into the Sno-Cat. “Okay, get in, everyone,” he calls over the humming engine. “I’ll drive.”113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡt1hv7NAzqT
Victor takes point at the wheel, and Esther slides into the seat alongside him. The second row of seats is occupied by Leo and Samuel, handguns shuffling in holsters on their hips, and that leaves the third and final row to me. I squish into the back, buckle myself into the seat, and give Victor a thumbs-up motion to indicate he’s good to drive.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡArdTG79Dl7
So we hum out of the garage. To me, the Sno-Cat is a marvel of machinery and human prowess, a beast of a land-roving vehicle with four articulating tracks for wheels. It bears the same color palette as the fur-lined parkas issued to the rest of the crew from the US government, a burnt sienna. This hue makes it a veritable beacon in the darkness covering Antarctica, so dutifully brought upon us by a raging blizzard.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡEUS5IqOzed
The conditions in the barren wilderness outside of Valor Station are nothing to scoff at. The wind howls at us from all directions as Victor struggles to navigate the accumulating snowdrifts piled into towers meters away from the garage, a task only capable of being accomplished when placed upon the back of the Sno-Cat. From what I remember Michelle saying to me days prior, the winds should reach 180 miles-per-hour near midday, a fact that spells disaster for any plane desperate enough to fly directly through it. That is to say nothing of the visibility conditions. Even when I press my face and fingers up to the glass window to my right, I struggle to see even five feet past the vehicle. Snow seeks to blot out everything around us. It blinds us; it blocks us off from the rest of the world. If we allow it to, it may even block us off from ourselves. Perhaps the only way we can navigate through the blizzard and towards the plane wreckage is through the use of the massive smoke signal rising in a long, ashen column thousands of feet into the air. Though the snow is all-encompassing, brutal, and frigid to a fault, not even such conditions could block fire from doling out radiance to every weary passerby.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzAmqGsJqYY
The trip itself is a silent one. Though the four other individuals in the Sno-Cat are hardened men and women, from soldiers to doctors, I can tell that the potential of death weighs heavily on their shoulders. Though great friends that never miss an opportunity to joke with each other, Sam and Leo grow silent during the journey, and they allow the Sno-Cat’s engine to speak for them. I know what they are thinking; this supply run was supposed to carry the wintering crew over until Summer rolled around again. Even beyond pilots lying in pools of their own blood near the crash, they face a secondary disaster when it comes to being adequately supplied for the Winter. The thought alone is enough to prompt a sigh upon my lips, a sound I immediately stifle by clamping my mouth shut. Hope. I must have hope.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvI6UBk6vgK
With time, however, the Sno-Cat draws closer and closer to the plane’s crash site. A long trail of smoke eschews blurriness in favor of announcing its presence to the expedition, emanating from a single glorious blaze in the center of annihilated machinery and long, shorn hunks of steel. In the middle of a small clearing a few meters away, my eyes finally curve across a Lockheed LC-130 Hercules lying dejected in a flaming pile of junk.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXY3bfUO3Ti
It looks to have been torn in two. As if a great eagle had descended upon it mid-air in a flurry of talons and fury, the left-wing has been disconnected from the main body entirely, and it’s been discarded a yard or so away, left to gather a thin layer of snow on the top. If I still believed in God, perhaps I may have understood that this was a message from Heaven itself, that the Valor Station project is a doomed one, but superstition has long since evaded me. All I can tell now is simply that the plane is truly out of commission, and based upon the fire raging near the cargo hold, the supplies it once carried have been annihilated as well.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLePyZowCBA
Most importantly, however, are the weak please for help emanating from the cockpit, crushed and dented on the top with the likes of a giant cosmic mallet.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGM0bkPmslP
Upon Victor pulling the Sno-Cat into a parked position, Esther immediately escapes the vehicle, and her boots slam onto the hard, icy Antarctic ground in a muffled crouch. Her figure promptly approaches the cockpit, and she’s followed close behind by Leo and Sam. Victor takes more time in exiting the vehicle, but for a good reason. He retrieves a small red first-aid kit from a tiny upper compartment in the Sno-Cat, and then he rushes towards the cockpit. I’m the last to leave.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrC1iL7srUq
By the time I leave the comforting warmth of the Sno-Cat to enter the frigid, disastrous conditions outside, Esther is already hauling up a piece of metal up and away from the cockpit in a desperate bid to free whoever lies within. Never one for missing out on a good shot, I retrieve my black Nikon camera from my backpack, and I raise it in front of my eyes to peer into the lens.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIde9sclSFN
Click. I snap a shot of Esther peering beneath a crooked sheet of steel with long, sharp chunks taken from the side. A bloodied hand reaches from the debris, outstretched towards her.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡuHACSgk31N
Click. The next photo I snap is of Leo and Samuel dragging a young woman from the debris, her face bloodied and her eyes dull and rheumy. She claims fame to a brilliant mane of red hair, burning like the fire that haloes her soft, rounded features, but her hair’s shine is significantly dulled by smoke and ash and further brought down into the depths of obscurity by bloodied mats sticking to her skull at odd, spiky angles.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdOXYAsSpPh
Click. The third and final photo is Esther staring down into the dull, crepuscular eyes of a man who had not managed to survive the crash, the pilot. His arms splay across the plane’s shattered dashboard in a gory, macabre display, and his tongue is nothing more than a mass of crimson flesh gleaming like a ruby in his open mouth. There is no mistaking that his personage has been reduced to nothing more than a corpse, especially not by my keen eyes. I’ve seen corpses too many times to be incapable of picking one from a crowd.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCRUTX6M2VA
Even so, I am not partial towards looking at such horrific visages. I see the blood on his chest, the gaping hole where his lungs should have been, and I stumble to the side to release my guts onto the snow crunching beneath my spiked boots. He reminds me of a man from my past, with the same dull eyes and the pale skin dotted with swollen capillaries. He’s inhuman, nothing more than a mound of protruding flesh and seeping crimson ichor, and the mere thought draws me to expel the contents of my stomach.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUrkVaMRudQ
Stomach acid seeps into the snow beneath me without recompense. With tears gathering in the corners of my eyes, I straighten, and I tug at the perimeter of my mouth with my sleeve, ridding myself of stomach-churning residue from moments before. However, when I look back at the corpse, this time without the need to filter my eyes through my digital camera’s shots, I find that my stomach doesn’t rumble and churn in comparison to the first time I had witnessed the body. Perhaps it is a change of heart, an intrinsic rewriting of the code within my mind. Instead of blood, I see crimson butterflies, the same twisted, delicate beings my father pinned upon his study’s walls in my childhood. The petite insects sit in the stranger’s chest cavity, and they feed upon his tattered remains, but they make no move to exit. So long as the butterflies remain, covering that which should not be seen, I can keep looking at the man for as long as I want.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2juju88aGZ
And that’s all I do. I look. Perhaps that’s all I can do. Esther and Leo and Sam and Victor are suited for salvaging this situation, for retrieving the copilot from her steel grave, but I am nothing more than a journalist in a makeshift warzone. I take pictures, I make them pretty for the uneducated masses back home, and I leave. At the end of the day, I know well that I would be a useless asset nonetheless, an obstacle to their progress. My hands are not suited for world-changing events, but theirs are.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡhZ0sHZ2JJ6
So, as Victor leans down to patch the bleeding, nigh-unresponsive woman into a state of coherent thought with nimble thumbs and deft fingers, I return to the Sno-Cat, and I wait for extradition. I got what I came here for, and my presence is no more welcome than frostbite. It’s best to remain silent, just as Mom taught me so many years ago in Mass.113Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9T8D6sK9t3
