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The Ice Museum — Flight
Seen from above, the ice sounds a ceaseless warning. A vicious blankness emanates from the white expanse below. The shadow of the plane falls on fleeting clouds. The ice smothers forests and mountains under a thick pall. Nothing moves across the whiteness.
The plane is drifting downwards, falling towards the glazed countryside. The ice looks like silence, like the physical embodiment of nothingness. A paradox, a symbol expressing the inexpressible; here is the vivid realisation of absence. As the plane descends, the warning sounds insistently: LEAVE. A single syllable resounding across the smothered land. No point in coming here. The country is closed for the ice deluge, to be opened in the spring. The plane is plunging through a white sky, into banks of drifting cloud. The trees below are bleached, their branches bent under the weight of the snow. As the plane skids across the runway the trees blur into lines of whiteness.
Inglorious — Retreat
She began it on an ordinary summer’s day when she found — quite in contravention of the orders of her boss — she was idling at the computer, kicking her heels and counting. Rosa Lane, 35 and several months, aware of an invisible stopwatch tolling her down, was counting the years, the hours spent sitting in offices, staring at the sky, at the flickering screen that was sending her blind. She had passed the previous ten years in a holding position, her legs locked under a table. She had typed a million emails and strained her wrists. She was no closer to understanding anything. Ahead she saw the future, draped in grey. Behind was the damp squib of her family’s history. She was sitting in the present, with this past and future whirling around her. And outside the city was awash with daytime noise — the grind of traffic, blurred speech, elusive choirs. The noise was ebbing and rising again, and she heard the cries of birds in the eaves. She thought of the river moving and the flow of cars, smoke drifting across the shine and colour.