Author: R. J. Erbacher
The perspective from her floor-to-ceiling office windows, in the seventy-fifth tallest building in Manhattan, gave Van a stately view of the snow, which started rather innocently around noon on Friday. She picked at her salad in the plastic clam shell and watched it silently descend, beginning to coat the city with white. It looked existential and cold.
By two o’clock, with no letup, the two dozen workers at Vanessa Ripp Enterprises were worried about their commute home. The last weather report predicted that this was one of those quirky storms, depending on the track, that could deposit somewhere between three inches and three feet. She magnanimously gave everyone the afternoon off. Unfortunately, sixty-five percent of her business was on the west coast, and somebody had to stay and handle the calls and emails because it wasn’t snowing in California. By the time it was dark a curtain of falling flakes blanched her entire wall of windows and all the city lights beyond.
At five o’clock Van locked the office door’s access from the elevators so nobody could enter without getting buzzed in by her. A stroll through the vacant halls confirmed that every cubicle and office was empty, and she was alone. At the kitchen fridge she scrounged for herself a dinner of string cheese and a ginger ale.
Van worked at her desk until almost nine before she shut down, a long fourteen-hour day. There had been no rush because she had no plans on leaving. No one waiting for her at home except her cat, Wolf, who had an automatic feeder and self-cleaning litter box. She’d spend the night on her office sofa, sleep late tomorrow and wait for the garbage trucks to clear the roads, then drive home.
She stretched out her muscles, stepped out of her pumps, made fists with her toes on the rug, undid the neckline zipper in the back of the black dress and hung it on a hangar. Then Van unclasped her black bra and tossed it over her seat back and fingered off the matching panties as well. Naked, she stepped to the window until her nipples touched the cold glass sending a shiver along her skin. Fat drifting powder-flakes obliterated everything two feet beyond the building. It was as if there was nothing else out there. In the silence, Van mused that she was the only person in a snow shrouded world of white.
Stretching out on the sofa, she coyly covered herself with the tartan Afghan off the couch back, letting her hands warm the chilled parts of her body.
She was brutally aroused by the bitter wind, biting into her bare shoulders and arms. Van shrugged the blanket up to her neck and oddly wondered where the breeze was coming from. Snapping open her eyes she saw that there were no windows in her office as snow drifts blew in with the ashen sunrise. As she gazed wildly around in panic, she saw there was no actual office; no desk or chair, no computer or coffee machine, no pictures on the wall. It was a hollowed-out space, save the couch she was lying on and solidified slopes of ice in the corners. The rug was threadbare and mostly torn away. She bundled the throw about her shivering naked body as best as possible, but it did little to shield her from the frigid blast. Carefully she tiptoed on her bare feet, avoiding the debris that littered the floor, over to the cavity that used to be her windows and looked down and saw only snow. The twenty-two-story building across the street showed only the top two floors through the white mantle. Twenty stories of snow – almost three hundred feet deep.
She’d woken up to a nightmare. Van had conjured this realm up in her mind just before she went to sleep and slipped into an alternate future. How far? Maybe twenty years? More? Was this frightening version of her existence even the same dimension?
She was alone. And utterly defenseless in this new world of snow, except for a tartan blanket.
Van huddled back onto the sofa and clamped her eyes shut and prayed to go back to sleep. But she knew she wouldn’t.
It was too cold.