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The Yeti

January has yet been decidedly unsnowy this year. Day after day, with a madness of mildness and hangdog expressions and children who no longer play properly. The sleds are kept in the sheds. And Jack Frost is now a dream, with his craziness gone from the panes. Icicles are dangled from gutters at Christmas as glass replicas. Nobody, though, had yet… Yet what? Nobody knew what they hadn’t yet… hadn’t yet … it was so difficult to finish a … to finish a …

A paragraph? Someone once dreamt of taking part in a universal tontine but nobody took part because nobody had yet… Everyone had not yet … understood what a tontine is? Even the children were still… The old people started to … Started to what? To die? Well, not yet. Not in any way would I die, for one.

There were so many unfulfilled yets. Yet this, yet that. And then suddenly one day, as January turned into February upon the back of Winter, a white glaze settling over what I could see. But I could not yet see … hah!

I just added a word after yet. I could not yet see … could not yet see what? A strange shape began to emerge, at first a vision of Jack Frost with limbs as broken icicles. Then it became a jigsaw of crystals, forming a mound like an unfinished elephant. The face was abominable. I could hardly look at it. The children shouted at seeming snowflakes that billowed to become like analog static over a screen. Normally the children would have shrieked with delight at the renewed onset of a wintry day upon oodles of precipitation. But the face scared them by peering at them through the blizzards of some nightmare, my nightmare, not the nightmare of anybody else. I had won the tontine, it seemed, but what was the point of winning as I sat atop a pyramid that had been crudely carved from the last ever igloo.

What’s the point of winning when there is nobody left to see you winning it? 

I peered into cascades of icy clutter, synchronised shards bouncing off a coat of whiteness upon serendipitous sheds, and I was trying to see where everything began and ended. Until I could make out the reflection of abomination upon the underbelly of a glacier. But it eventually melted before I could see the reflection properly. But, so far, it had not melted, never yet. A yetinfinity.