Family on Ice

The mountain had been speaking for three days.

Not loudly. A low grumbling that the ground carried better than the air, felt in the feet and the ankles and the back of the jaw. They had felt this before, all of them, the mountain made noise sometimes, and they had moved twice in living memory because of it, and both times the moving had been the right thing to do, and both times they had come back when it quieted.

This time the man watched it and thought about moving and watched it some more.

The woman knew he watched it. She said nothing. She had said what she had to say two days ago and he had not disagreed with her and had not moved and she understood this was what he was doing even though he had not said it.

The children slept.

On the morning of the fourth day the man was outside before dawn, and the mountain was darker against the dark sky than it should have been, a darkness that was not cloud and not shadow but the mountain itself doing something. He watched it. The ground under his feet was warm.

Not warm the way sun-warmed ground was warm. Warm from below.

He went inside and woke the woman.

She looked at his face and rose.

* * *

They moved before the sun came up, the children half-awake and carrying what they could carry, the woman with the youngest on her back. They went toward the high ground along the trail they knew, the one that ran above the river. The man went last. He kept looking back.

He saw it begin.

The top of the mountain opened. That was the only word he had for it, and it opened, the way a wound opens, and what came out was not fire, not exactly, it was light and dark at once, a column that rose faster than anything he had ever seen move, black and white and lit from inside, climbing into the sky with a speed that had no comparison in his experience. He stopped walking.

He could not have said why he stopped. The column went up and up and it was already above the clouds and still going and he understood, in the way you understood things that had no words, that this was not the mountain speaking.

the mountain ending.

The sound reached him.

He had heard thunder close enough to feel. He had heard the cracking of ice in the spring when the river broke. He had heard the sound a large tree made when it fell in the forest, the crack and the long crashing through the canopy and the impact. None of these were adequate. The sound was not a sound so much as a cessation. The air itself compressed and then released, and in the releasing it took everything else with it, and for a moment he heard nothing at all because there was nothing left to hear with.

Then the pain in his ears and the woman screaming ahead of him on the trail and the children.

He ran.

* * *

They ran for an hour. The sky behind them was wrong in a way that grew more wrong as they ran, the column spreading at its top into a shape that flattened and darkened and began to eat the sky from where the mountain was, outward. The ash started before they reached the high ground, first as a fine grit in the air that was not quite visible, then as something that was.

It tasted of rock and heat.

The youngest child coughed.

The man looked back and the sky behind them was black. Not storm-black. A black that had texture to it, that moved at its edges in ways clouds did not move.

He had been watching the sky his whole life and there was nothing in his experience to put this in.

He looked at the woman. She looked back too. She had the youngest against her chest and her face had the look it had when she had finished calculating and arrived at the answer.

She said something to him. The oldest child was already holding the next one’s hand. They were good children.

He said something back.

They kept moving.

* * *

The surge came from behind them in the late afternoon.

They heard it before they saw it: a sound like the world tearing, low and vast, coming up through the ground and the air at once. The trees ahead of them moved without wind, first a trembling and then a bending, away from what was coming. Birds came over them in a mass, thousands of them, too fast, not in formation, just away.

The man put the children behind him. He knew it was not useful. He did it anyway.

The woman stood beside him.

The cloud came through the valley below them first. It was not like any cloud. It moved along the ground the way water moved, filling the low places, pouring over obstacles, and it was the color of ash and it moved faster than anything he had run from in his life.

The heat reached them before the cloud did. Not the heat of a fire, which had direction and diminishment. This heat was everywhere at once, coming from behind them and from the air and from the ground, and it grew and grew and there was nowhere it was not.

The youngest child had stopped coughing.

The man reached back without looking and found his children’s hands.

The cloud came up the slope.

In the last moment he looked back toward the mountain, searching for the angle, the read, the response.