Dense snowfall suffocated Chicago. Anything rustling was suppressed with weight. Anything chromatic was simplified to pure white. Anything keen was dulled with pillowtops. Chicago became still, not light.
The break room always had donuts and bogwater coffee. Corey Lewson nibbled at a powdered raspberry-filled. The foremen at Fisk Power Plant dismissed Corey's department around 11:00 am due to a melange of mishaps (fallen powerlines in fourteen distribution grids, broken down service trucks, marooned chief engineers), though no one left.
No one could leave. They were indiscriminately snowed in. The storm did not surgically exempt Fisk Power Plant workers from its mayhem, Corey conceded. Some of the switchboard operators slept in chairs, most stood around ruing they had come to work at all that day, muttering words like purgatory and and whodafiggered and ironic. There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. Corey snagged the last chocolate-on-chocolate and took seat by the window.
The flue stacks coughed coal soot into the face of winter. With all those distribution grids disabled, Corey didn't know what use the energy was. Streetlamps tinted distant snow antique colors in stale sepias. It all looked old to Corey. He wondered how long those streetlamps stood and would stand. Or Fisk Power Plant, for that matter. Umbilical power lines stretched deep into the blizzard, feeding the dim apparition of no ghost town he knew.
A flurry granted momentary clarity. He saw two of the service trucks wheel into the parking lot, who knows by what serendipity. Men in gray coveralls disembarked to clumsily march through waist-deep depths. Straining, Corey lost track of their movements, their footprints, their trucks, their presence, their names. He never heard the doors open, just prattling and snoring.
Everything just looked white again. He ate one with rainbow sprinkles. The road would have to thaw eventually.
No comments:
Post a Comment