Wite-Out Sky

When I woke this morning the world was white. The sky was white. That usually happens when there are big fluffy clouds covering the sky, but this sky was Wite-Out white. Liquid paper spilled over the dome of the sky -- or white chenille stuck up there with the chenille side facing me. I had to go outside to make sure I wasn't missing part of the picture. 

I wasn't. 

I hadn't.  

It was all there.  The sky was white in every direction, not a sign of clouds overlapping or cobblestoning the heavens. White. Blank. Albino. Nothingness as far as my eyes could see. The absence of everything. Everything except the sun's light illuminating my world without a sign of the burning orb anywhere. Just light. White cold light that struck no answering faceted brilliance of gem fire like sparks struck from crystalline jewels. Just white. Absence. Cold emptiness. 

I expected to see snow -- on the trees, on the deck, on the railings, on the ground. I had watched yesterday's rain and sleet and smaller than pea size hail turned into thick clumps of snowflakes while I watched, and eventually into ground covering weighted with all the rain that had fallen moments before -- for several hours before. Seeing that white sky sent me outside to take photos and to marvel at the sheer surprising endlessness. A white hell pregnant with portents, frigid fingers creeping slowly up and down my spine, firing all my nerve endings with incandescent flames more pervasive than any Brian Keene novel. I fought the urge to load the shotgun and barricade the glass doors from where I would goggle mute, horrified, uncomprehending at the shambling, relentless hordes.

The Rising lurches like broken marionettes barely attached with rotting and broken strings from termite-infested crossbars at the edge of my brain to be glimpsed from the corner of the third eye, there and not there, threatening to become tangible.

There is a blue cast to the photos above, the same blue cast that tinges all my winter snow pictures. Must be the blue light the camera picks up that my eyes see as white. Unadulterated and untinted white. Dead white. Wite Out white. White that is not the absence of color but the presence of all colors and all light waves and all the colors of fear and apprehension and . . . ominous shades of chaos and . . . something more primal, more basic, more . . . nightmarish.

I am not given to flights of fear or nerves and hair standing on end normally. I am a rational person able to face the abyss as vertigo unsettles my vision and sets my heart thump, thump, thumping in abject terror with a smile on my face and reflexes tensed to spring toward safety should the edge crumble and tumble me to the center of nothingness. Always alert. Always ready. Always poised to flee. And yet here I am watching the heavy snow weigh the branches, bending the sturdy branches into arcs as though ice froze the branches and pine cones and needles into an eternity of stillness, until drips and drops and clumps and spilling walls of wet white cascade in crystalline curtains and drapes and frosty lumps to the mounded dunes growing up from the ground. Albino stalagmites growing toward the Wite-Out sky.

I wonder if my fantasy has overtaken my common sense in an avalanche of restless waiting for the inevitable while the world outside this snow packed dome that isolates me and keeps me prisoner in an albino world as the long day of watching -- and waiting for . . . something -- leaches color from my rosy skin as it has silenced this corner of the mountain in an upturned milk glass bowl. Only time will tell what slouches this way, time that has been plucked from the normal stream of seconds, minutes, and hours, slowed to a crawl, gliding along its freezing slime trail and the heart thunders to a diminishing crescendo of purpose . . . before it falters, stalls, , and . . . stops.

That is all. Disperse . . . while you can.