I reblogged this and within moments, I heard a loud bang. I looked out my window, and it seemed that snow had began to fall heavily- it wasn’t too dense now, but as I looked, transfixed, the cars crouched low on their suspension as the weight piled up. The snow grew and grew at a shocking pace. I stared for one minute- the windows of the bottom floor disappeared beneath the white mountain. I watched for two, and the second and third were buried. My brain stuttered like a gear skipping a tooth. I didn’t believe it was real for a moment- I ran through explanation after explanation. I was tired, I’d been drugged, this was a dream. I tried to believe it as I saw the white sea rushing up towards me, but fear does not believe in illusions. Fear wrested the wheel from me and sent me running, half-dressed, through the door to my room. My eyes flicker to the door in which my co-tenants lay asleep, but flight has no friends- fear kills fraternity. The door to my apartment slammed open and the concrete stairs up shot past my face, thrown downwards by my legs and arms. The white sea raced me upwards. I heard a deafening crash echo upwards through the stairwells as the pressure smashed the ground floor door open, and a rushing sound filled my ears as the snow poured in. The eighth floor. The ninth. I more or less crashed into the door with the neon sign above it. The sign glowed its message; Sortie. Relief flooded my body, soothing the aching of my legs roused from their sedentary malnourishment. I tried the doorknob and felt it push back against me- locked.
The rushing of the snow began to grow louder. Each level it climbed was marked by another crash- the weight of the snow overcoming another fire-safe door.
Without thinking, I lunged for the fire safety closet opposite the door. Locked as well, but this padlock was small. I closed both hands around it and braced my foot against the wall and heaved with desperate, animal strength. The sharp facets of the metal dug red lines into my skin, but the thin metal gave way before my pain tolerance did, and the locker swung open.
Inside, a fire extinguisher, a thick fire-retardant blanket, and a breach axe hung, dripping with age and disuse. I only left behind the canister. Another bang made me flinch violently- only a couple more floors before its frozen embrace, it’s impossible weight, would bury me. I knew it would never stop falling. I knew something had changed. This did not follow rules of reality. It was reality, and it superseded all the old ones. This was a new world, and I was its sole child-but only if i adapted. It would smother its only witness without compassion. It did not care to have its beauty catalogued or witnessed. I would have to earn my birth.
The thin metal door bent under the first blow. My bones vibrated agonizingly with the force. Another bang underscored my failure. Couldn’t have been more than three levels away. A pit opened in my stomach.
I aimed my strike at the lower hinge this time. The heavy blade cleft thin, machined metal and drywall like paper. Another bang. I felt this one through the floor. The echo of the stairwell had decieved me. The snow had hit the roof of the previous floor.
I brought the axe down on the upper hinge with a kind of fatalistic vigor. I didn’t care so much to live- I cared to die satisfied with my efforts.
The head of the axe, loosened by use, flew off the handle before even striking the hinge. It flew through the tiny window of tempered glass, landing somewhere in the snow. I peered through the window. The snow outside was faster than the snow indoors. It crashed over the edges of the roof and shoved the door off its hinges, folding inwards. The door lay on a rapidly-growing snowdrift, with a tiny sliver of a grey-white sky showing through a rapidly shrinking apeture between the snowdrift and the now-bare doorframe. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the snow round the stairs and shoot towards me.
I leapt, lunged, crawled, dug. The snow was deadly cold, but i forced my unclothed body not to pull away. The snow piled on my head, squeezed my hips against the doorjamb. I felt the snow inside the building against the soles of my feet as it filled.
I don’t know how long I was stuck there, but eventually I forced myself through- first my hips, bone grinding painfully against wood
