I look like fresh snowkill to you, an off-piste tourist.
Jab and shovel.
You snap a hip-bone whittled by time and ice to a classic angle: man caught between a rock and a hard place.
Scylla and Charybdis, if you like, scholars that you are.
Something rings a bell, maybe me, all sounding brass and tinkling cymbals on your table where I grow a fungal vest you barely notice, wrestling over custody.
You miss the arrowhead in my left shoulder, pronounce me:
Victim of a castration in the Egyptian manner.
I invite you, gentlemen, to stick your dicks in a glacier for fifty-three centuries.
Later, you judge mine shrunken from mummification.
Pissing contest over, you number me among the Incorruptibles, more incorrupt than most, no Clare slowly darkening behind the grille in Assisi, until they fit a tactful silver mask. A cheap saint, me.
But that won’t do either, apparently my bones fell straight from heaven, via meteor.
Busy body, me, cursing seven people, including one who found me, poor sod.
They drop.
Monster, Yeti, martyr, extra-terrestrial, anything but a poor fool slotted by chance between two rocks within a glacier, a man-sandwich still wearing his hide satchel of food, tools, medicines, whipworm in his gut, arthritis in his joints, pinprick trail where acupuncture fails or – grant me the irony, succeeds, gets me where I am today. The Copper Age, Chalcolithic, gives me the axe that impresses you, the sheep that don’t, the shoes you admire, try to patent.
What makes me waver on the ledge for that split-second?
He who hesitates is frost, right? Perma. Frozen Fritz, you call me, Ötzi for the Ötz Valley, where you found me. Names for a dog.
Mrs. Lot – also nameless – trod on hems of flame, heard the screams – became a sculpture in tears pared down to salt: antiseptic, currency, seasoning, grief.
Orpheus feels a tug at the end of his arm like a fish on a line, it’s dim, dark. Drowning, he has to see – and me, turned back for one last look.
Now it’s your turn. Freeze, burn, but look back, white bears, seals, walruses swim baffled fathoms, groping for purchase on slush caps rendering like tallow. This is now, amigo.
Ice is preservative. That we live. That anything lives, links everything that is. A whisper from iced lips, an ice-swansong. We ice over, overnight. Ice.
Listen to the I slide in the sibilant. I is. Ice.
Aileen La Tourette Aileen La Tourette is a former Chair of SOF Network. Her latest novel The Oldest Girl was reviewed by Anne Ashworth in Sofia 104.
Ötzi the Ice Man was found in the Alps on the border between Italy and Austria in 1991. He had been there for approximately 5,200 years.