Ficlet: Perfect Little World
The first time it snowed that year, Henry was sitting at the old rolltop desk at the end of the hall in the country house, occasionally looking up from the scattered pages in front of him as the flakes began to fall silently past the curtains. Everyone else was still asleep, and for a moment Henry felt like the only person in the world, watching the landscape slowly transform from the dawn shadows to a pristine white. Again and again he caught himself staring out the window and forced his eyes back to his neat pages of notes. For the first time in as long as he could remember he found it hard to concentrate on the rhythmic flow of translation; he was so used to the rest of the world falling away when he opened his books that he wondered if he were becoming ill.
It came as something of a shock when he realized he'd been sitting there for a length of time - long enough for a cigarette to burn into a long cylinder of ash - staring out the window without the slightest awareness of the passage of time. He'd lived with snow all his life, of course, and by his age he should have been used to it, but for some reason it never failed to inspire a childlike wonder in him. He thought of the Greek historian Herodotus, who had believed that snow was made up of white feathers, and had complained bitterly that nothing of the Northern lands could be discerned because of all the white feathers constantly blowing in one's face.
In Norse mythology the world began when the sea of flames, Muspellsheim, met Niflheim, the land of frost. The heat melted the snow and from the two was life begun. Henry prefers this origin story to many others he has read. The idea that life is made up of equal parts untamed heat and flame and the intricate, crystalline precision of snow and ice is something Henry finds unusually fitting. And more than that, compelling. The snow was perfect, in its way: silent, beautiful, pure, and cruel.
The Romans had called all of the Northern lands Ultima Thule, far off lands of strange things and stranger people. Watching the snow fall, Henry wondered if his life wasn't reaching its own map's boundaries; if he would soon become so completely part of the past that he will be unable to exist in the present. It would not be the worst thing.
It was only when he heard the unmistakable thump of Bunny's feet on the stairs that Henry recalled where he was and what he had been attempting to do. Of course, with the others up further attempts at translation would be impossible. Lighting another cigarette, he prepared for his prefect little world to be invaded.