A sea of white. This isn’t how I imagined this week going. I’m supposed to be on a tropical beach, engulfed with coconuts and margaritas. Instead, I’m accompanied by a dead guy and a living one who I wish was dead. Fortunately, the stench of decay has been postponed since the body hasn’t started thawing…it’s too damn cold in The Arctic!

 Is it bad that I’m more worried about my cats back home than I am about Blake- the guy who won’t shut up about graduating from Harvard?

My team and I are at The Australian Casey Research base located in the Arctic Belt. Using a grant, three select individuals were chosen to document the effects of climate change on the ice shelves.

Before Lee (the dead guy) was fried by an open circuit, he was a brilliant and experienced meteorological scientist from The University of Beijing. Lee was tall. He had wavy black hair, and wasn’t a mastermind when it came to electrical engineering. Blake, on the other hand, is a little short. He almost reminds me of the Lorax by how he senselessly shuffles his feet, and mutters under his breath time after time. 

I’m sure Lee and Blake were just as oblivious to my appearance, as I was to theirs. An Irish lass with pasty skin, unkempt massive hair, and obligatory green eyes. Mom always said my eyes are my best feature, “Windows to the soul.”

“How much freshwater do we have left?” I asked Blake. 

“Enough for at least two MREs.” 

My response was, “Handy, considering that's all we have left.” 

“Yeah, well maybe we’d be feasting if you would have let us depart from this desolate hell hole when we were instructed to.” 

“There wouldn’t have been room for everyone. You know captains go down with the ship.” 

“Neither of us is the captain in this white wasteland. Why should I be gumming down chunky food rations? I’d feel guilty giving this to my dog.”

It occurred to me that we don’t really know what people are capable of, ourselves or others. The thoughts floating through my mind are unimaginable when compared with the person I always believed to be. So much for preconceptions, and maybe I’m not entirely self-aware. It’d be mad to ponder the darker impulses one might have, but at this moment it’s hard to keep them at bay. 

The sooty remnants of burnt paper are all that’s left of copious notes we were pining over before the blizzard hit. Their flakes are spread throughout the still, frigid air from within the murky lab, enveloped by our shaky breaths. “Surviving this will be a miracle,” Blake exclaims from across the fiery trash can. “Well, for one of us.”

Minutes pass, ones that objectively feel like hours. When your body is so motionless and thoughts are in constant battle with one another, all a person can do is lay witness. That’s what I did, watch. Watch the orange and red flames tiptoe around the metal-rimmed trash can. The flames are alive, yet, they’re unable to wander. Forever enclosed in the vast pit, yet, able to fantasize. Able to reach far beyond the trash’s surface, until a single flame's manifest destiny expires. Then poof, simultaneously, when the flame wins and crosses the rim, the flame dies. I shuffle more paper into the trash bin to restart the cycle. 

Blake and I are flames, limited by the research facility. I fantasize about seeing my cats: Muffin, Donna, Rocky, and Ryan Reynolds. I’m sure Blake mourns over his sleepless nights without a set of bosoms in his grasp. Some people have blankys, and some people resemble Blake. 

I’m so hungry. 

Blake is hunched over in the fetal position, hogging the last MRE. 

 I’m so hungry.

Blake’s limp body is asleep. We’re both lethargic from the perpetual shivering. 

I’m so hungry. My lips are coated in a dry, sticky coat of paste left over from when I had a hallucination that Blake was a chicken wing. I almost bit him, maybe I should have. 

My stomach twists and turns from the pockets of air left in place of food. It’s impossible to sleep through any of this, with our bellies gurgling like hurricanes. 

The blizzard outside is roaring through the thin walls. That’s what a budgeted research study gives a person. The uncovered window at the other end of the room is pulsating cold air. The windows were uncovered after Blake and I got into a fight over me trying to eat him alive. 

“What are you doing Margo? This is the last MRE. You ate yours already. Don't come closer!” -Blake

I imagine waking up to me drooling over his sleeping body wasn’t the best wake-up call, even for Blake. 

Blake gripped the window curtain with his thumb and pointer finger. He was ripping the metal rod and cloth from the wall to use as weaponry. It worked well enough because after knocking me unconscious, I woke up to the disgust of his living presence. I still have the bump, since this happened about an hour ago. 

I have a whole life back home. I’m only 28, there’s so much to experience. Still struggles to endure, and mistakes to be made; like that one time a B-Dubs. I need to survive, at any cost. But how?

A storm of despair crosses over me as I’m eyeing Blake. I think to myself-

The radar forecast said the Blizzard should end soon. But, there isn't enough time to wait another day without food. Why should both of us die? What did I do to deserve any of this? Blake is a misogynist. He’s probably thinking about eating me anytime now. 

Now I see him for who he truly is. He’s faking sleep. Anytime now I’ll meet my end. Unless I get to him first. 

I carefully wrap a metal shard off of the floor in my lab coat sleeve. I’m over his body now. Hesitantly, but forcefully, I slip a pillow over his face. 

My muscles are so weak, I don’t know how long I can hold him. This will have to be done in a more gruesome manner. 

That’s the last thing I remember before the blackout. Afterward, I was hunched over the fire like a rabid animal. But I'm no longer hungry. 

The radar lied. It’s been 24 hours since the incident. In the array of frozen blooms, where the air kisses the lungs so coolly, the blizzard tips the balance of emotion from adventure to caution. Every flake lies another path to the snowy dunes created. 

Is it possible, I made a mistake? Did I just kill an innocent man, for nothing but my own agenda? It’s useless, I will die here as a murderer. The three of us were destined to die here. It was foolish and half-witted for me to think one can control fait. 

Thinking back on the incident. Slowly, blood splattered from his liver as I pried the metal shard out of Blake's hard lifeless body. 

He’s not there anymore. He’s gone. You did what you had to do to survive. The ends justify the means.

This is the biggest lie of all. “The ends justify the means.” I will die, just as Lee did, and just as Blake did. The ends do not justify the means. 

I lay myself down by the fire. Lifting the wege high above my neck, my eyes shut correspondingly. 

I love my cats. I sometimes think of dying when they die. That they are my lifeline. Morely, it is only fair my life is taken by the blizzard-like Blakes was taken by mine. 

My eyes glaze over. I can feel the blood pouring out of the slit. I was dead long ago, somebody just had to pull the trigger

— “I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence(BookFox, 2022).”