BEN BRIAR

Val dropped to his knees deep into the snow that tilled this peak of ice. I was about to do the same in despair, but the walking stick gave me a support to lean on like a plinth, careful not to lean too much into it or I would fall into the rift. Jennifer cried quietly, trying to stifle it but the cold did a much better job by freezing her tears before they flowed off her cheeks. Her sobs were sound, but her tears hid on her face as snow.

"Look at what you've goddamn done!" I told Val in my breaking voice. "We're never going to get back." I felt like lying into the snow and letting it take me as I cooped up to feel warmth before I died, instead of knowing I died like my father.

"You know I have a short attention span when it comes to details," he persisted. "You should have reminded me. Or maybe checked it yourself instead of breathing in the snow." Here it comes. This would heat me up for sure. Arguing, complaining, excuses, shouting over each other, reasons, lies - I could die warm this way but I only wanted to make amends with the professor.

But he brought something up that my spirit could not ignore. "You wanted this! So you could die in the snow like your father did. Because if you breathe the snow - you live in it and you die by it." No words escaped my throat, so I handled this like any triggered millennial did. I reached for his throat, strangling the words out of him. Jennifer yelped behind me and pleaded for me to stop.

My numb hand flailed at his neck and so it gave him the chance to resist. I couldn't stop because his neck was so warm, my ears were reddening under my hoodie and my face was heating up. He had been taken aback by the attack or was merely playing the part and in actuality, was expecting it. Val clawed at my face but didn't come close to scratching it, so he threw himself off the peak and I followed with my hands around his neck. We rolled down the slope of powdered ice. My face would be buried in the snow for a second and then my body would be in the air, the next.

We stopped where the snow leveled out and the rift was closer. Too close for comfort. My hand was crushed under my own weight, but I couldn't feel it because it had been the frozen appendage. The tumble down had ridden of the existing blizzard snow and balanced it out with snow from the peak. It didn't seem like Val was much affected because he stood above me, the radiantly blue atmosphere behind the skittles of snow bearing a sense of foreboding.

I had no idea who this person was but it wasn't Prof. Cobuge anymore. Or maybe it was and this was the real Val. The Val who desired nothing but to steal my work from under the pot of gold that I sat on but never managed to grasp. I had no imagination of striking gold in this investigation because it was my thesis, and only the hope of a discovery of solid evidence motivated me.

So the Val who saw greed as its benefactor, took ahold of me by the back of the jacket and began to drag me towards the edge. I raked my fingers into the snow, but one hand wasn't enough to stop the motion of a determined man in ending my life and taking over my career. What I feared at this point was what was to be made of Jennifer. Was she to live the same fate that I was about to experience? That was, dying upon the fall and even if I were to survive the fall, I would soon freeze in the water and the blizzard would blow my ice cube figure into an unknown crevasse at the bottom of this winter plateau in which the rift in the ice had halted. Or the tear in the fabric of the glacier that presided over the chilly backwater was instead a full-blown crack in the entirety of Antarctica, and in that case, my body would drift into the ocean and be bumped around by the flippers of whales and be fed upon by the sharks that could smell blood coursing through the veins of a frozen object above water and encased in the same property, just a different matter. Like a frozen dinner for sharks if sharks ate humans daily.

This would be ignited by the greed that burned in Val's eyes and the action that he was required to do in order to satisfy this burning. He was going to throw me off. And he did so with nothing but a whimper by me and a logical betrayal in mind. The last thing I heard was Jennifer's cries and it bore into me when the air passing through me was so loud that the silence of the water was the only thing that calmed the noises down.

The freezing water was holding me back from bursting through the surface and the depth of the water in which I had entered by default accredited to the height of the fall, was too far from the surface. I was already sinking, a sign that I was soon to be dead. I looked up at the ripple that I had created from the impact with liquid. A second ripple suddenly interrupted my ripple which I was upset at that something such as a boulder of ice was able to disrupt my serene passing.

But when I looked for the boulder of ice as expected, I came across another human in the water. Not dying alone filled my heart with pristine acceptance. It was the identity of the human that drained my beating heart of heat...

And I knew she should've remained on summer break.