Ice Age
...a full short story, as a thank you to paid subscribers. Ice Age was the very first story of mine that was professionally published, so I will be forever fond of it.
It was when the early autumn frosts first painted the pavements a delicate white that Coppard decided a new ice age was coming. It was the same day that his cold turned into feverish flu, and the same day that the woman he had been married to for eleven years, and loved for fourteen, phoned and told him never to call her again. For three days afterwards he lay in bed, his head as heavy as a stone, sweating and shivering and waking from vague dreams of stumbling through a cold white fog. Occasionally he felt as if his damp white sheets were about to open up and let him drop in a never-ending fall. When the fever finally broke he sat in the house for a fortnight wrapped in a duvet, phoning work every other day to chart his progress. The gas fire was on full, the central heating was switched on around the clock, but he never felt warm. He stared out of the window, watched the pale sky, listened to every weather forecast on the radio.
The thermometer by the door still said that the room was warm, but Coppard took that as a sign: a warning that the ice was returning but that this time it would steal in and catch the earth by surprise. Rather than slide slowly down from the mountains, driving life before it in a stately glacial procession, this time the ice would spring up suddenly from a thousand cracks in the earth, reaching a million frozen fingers into the hearts of trees and the roots of plants and the bones of people. One day people would realise that the chill was more pronounced than usual; they would joke, and dig out their warmest hats and gloves. It would be too little, far too late, for the next morning the earth would be still and white and wrapped tightly in the heart of the frost, forever unmoving, forever unchanging. After a few days Coppard took the thermometer down from the wall and dropped it into the kitchen bin, burying it under potato peelings and coffee grounds. Once, he phoned Ellen, but she hung up as soon as she heard his voice, and when he redialled her phone rang and rang and rang without answer.
After a fortnight Coppard decided that perhaps he could escape the cold, he had still had a couple of days sick leave left. Even though the house was well heated and he had stuffed twists of old newspaper into the cracks under doors and around window frames, the cold breathed up through the floor to find him sitting there, an easy target. He pulled out a road map of the country, took a thick black pen and obliterated the names of all the cities that he had been to with Ellen. Then he took a coin, tossed it into the air over the map, and watched where it fell.
