The building isn’t made of the best materials. Look closely and you’ll find premature cracks, unexpected stress. Measurements weren’t double-checked before cuts, the carpet runs out before the end of the hall.

I press the button for the basement. The elevator falls. When the doors open, I cross the rubber-stained concrete of the underground garage.

—

Would it have been different in the telling? A telling not like this, words mute on the gag of my tongue, but out loud—a historical scream. Or would the dead still be here, forever inside this body until I die, or until I, the killer, kill it?

Fluorescent light silvers the ridge of the berg. I stab my nails in the snow and start ripping out fistfuls, flinging hard, dirty hunks behind me. They shatter and spread on the lot. Soon I can’t feel anything up to my wrists, but my hands keep clawing until they meet a wall of ice. I smash through it to the soft inner core, then get on all fours and begin to tunnel, furious, panting, desperate.

Soon my legs are numb, my hair is filled with ice, and I’ve scooped out a pocket deep inside the mound. I look back at the misshapen mouth of the tunnel. The light doesn’t penetrate. I smell car exhaust, there’s salt on my lips, the filth of the city.

In the dark, I curl up in the cocoon of my hair and the dead lie down beside me. Within these walls, the story creeps out toward obscurity. One moment to the next, we are free of what happened, there’s a glow instead of memory. We can sleep, here, in permanent silence, we can seep into the snow.

About the Author

MICHAEL LaPOINTE has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement. He was a columnist with The Paris Review. He lives in Toronto.