Free The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

kept altering her focus as she tried to see more deeply into the storm, and the snow would catch her gaze and carry it back to the windshield in a series of shifting planes. Before so much as an hour had passed, her eyes had begun to ache and burn, though she knew she couldn’t look away. The spindrift was thick, hiding the telltale cross ridges and depressions that marked the openings of the crevasses. She had to watch the ground carefully to avoid them.
    The runners of the sledge were outfitted with circular frames of flat metal paddles—she thought of them as flippers—that slapped out in front of the sledge as it moved forward and then drew back underneath as it traveled on. They were a safety device, a sort of makeshift cantilever designed to carry her over any fissures she happened to encounter—or at least any fissures no more than six feet wide. Several times, she had felt the sledge plummeting forward suddenly and then lifting and righting itself before it moved on and she knew she had crossed over another crevasse. She felt as though she were driving a car down a crumbling road. The supporting ice of the glaciers had been decaying for decades, and rifts as deep as subway trenches could open in a matter of hours, sealing themselves off just as quickly. If she slipped, she wouldn’t be discovered until the ice finished melting sometime in the middle of the next century. But she had been trained by years of city driving to recognize every bump and jar she felt as just another flaw in the road. If she was leaning forward in her seat and a particular sort of lurch went through her body, she naturally assumed that she had hit a pothole. It was a form of muscle memory.
    Muscle memory. Mussel memory. Alive, alive-O!
    The storm continued for the next few days. She had to trust to her compass and the few flickering signals that registered on her GPS monitor to maintain her bearing. She knew when she had reached the ice stream that connected the land mass to the bay by the number of knolls and ridges that appeared in her path, and also by the generally brashy quality of the ice, but she had no idea how long it would take her to make it through the pass onto level ground.
    The snow fell heavy and fast. Sometimes she didn’t see the obstacles that lay ahead of her until they were only a few feet away. She had to drive very slowly to avoid them. She was lucky to cover a mile or two in an hour, ten or fifteen in a day. The runners of the sledge dipped, lifted, and dipped again as she made her way through the drifts, and the snowflakes clustered together like stars on her windshield. By the end of the day, when she lay down in her sleeping bag and closed her eyes, her body would seem to rock back and forth inside itself, and she would see streamers of white light slanting across her vision. Even in her dreams, she felt herself sledging across the ice and the darkness.
    She was working harder than she ever had in her life, and she was exhausted. She had chopped wood before. She had mixed concrete. She had even helped the Coca-Cola Homes for Neighbors Club build a row of apartments on the side of a hill, clearing the stumps and brush, laying the foundations and everything. But this was nothing compared to the effort of keeping a two-ton sledge on course through the center of a snowstorm. Whenever she stopped to rest, for even a few minutes, a stabbing pain would tear through the muscles in her calves and forearms, and she would have to remind herself to breathe. It was not so much the amount of exercise she was subjecting herself to, but the way she was holding her body at tension for so long. It took an hour or more of total stillness before her muscles would begin to go slack, followed by a comforting numbness that made her want to drift off to sleep.
    She was too tired to cook at night, and she was tempted to leave the metal pots and the Primus stove in the back of the sledge, but she carried them into the tent with her so