Too Cold For Snow

bawling stopped, then his whimpering, and finally Thomas stopped breathing. Anne faded like the last note on a pipe. So he had a bag of bones for a wife and a grey lump of flesh for a son.
    His wife only lingered on this earth for some days. Davy had to live with the image of the two tiny coffins in the graveyard at Gerazim, borne aloft so lightly on the shoulders of the bearers. It was an afternoon of sleeting rain. Davy’s parents died soon after, leaving him alone to contemplate the savagery of his personal God. Duw Cariad Yw is what it said in the Bible. God is Love.
    When the mine reopened after The Strike, some of the former workers were so rickety from lack of nutrition that their hips snapped as they crawled underground. One man’s elbows broke when he reached up for a rope. Another snapped a vertebra just looking up. And among the legion of the starved, the most pitifully lean was Davy, with his pipe-cleaner legs and flesh so thin you’d swear you could see his heart beating if he left his shirt collar open wide enough. Some days, as he chipped forward with his hands bandaged to soak up the blood, he heard his son’s crying as clearly as the church bell.
    Davy might have worked out his days on earth in Number Four were it not for the tragic day when a runaway spake smithereened a dozen pit props as it careened its way down one of the deepest tunnels, breaking men’s bodies like snapping chicken bones.
    Hitting the bottom, the reverberations set off a rumbling reaction in the earth and almost all Caled’s labyrinth of tunnels collapsed amid whirlwinds of cloying dust.
    He might have been concussed for a day or more. When Davy opened his eyes he could see nothing in the pitch dark but was aware of a burning pain in his right shoulder where it had been severed from the arm by a falling mass of coal. The weight of it pressing down on him had staunched the flow of blood, had near cauterised it, while threatening to collapse his rib cage. The arm lay there in the dark, its fingers, despite the congealing of the blood, making attractive suckling for a rat, the only other living creature in the tunnels. He coughed, and Davy could hear nothing other than the tiny claws of the animal scarpering, his blood on its whiskers.
    He had no sense of time other than the rate at which his hunger gnawed inside. It grew in intensity so that his mind was filled with images of cauldrons of his mam’s cawl, with luscious aromas. He had visitations of marmalade, bore witness to hallucinations featuring sides of hanging bacon.
    On the third day, Davy casually picked up the limb and sucked his own forearm, knowing that meat lasted long underground, something about the air, or the depth away from the sun, or the near absence of microbial life. Something, anyway. It was a white taste and without thinking about it he drove his incisors into the meat, and started tearing chunks away from the tendons. He carried on until he was sated and at that point the rush of nutrition gave him sufficient strength to attempt to lift the fractured spar of wood that had him pinned to the floor. It lifted, slowly at first, but then with a magical strength, he lifted it as if it were balsa. On his one hand and two knees he crawled along the floor, five fingers splayed out before him, searching in the dust for a candle, which he managed to light with the flint box he always carried with him.
    It was a garden of broken limbs, white tulip hands breaking through the dust stratum, faces of his friends now flattened or wrecked out of recognition, staring at him like dumb watermelons. He ate William Trefor’s buttocks over a three-day period, savouring the vague hint of carbolic soap which adhered to his skin. Him being a miner, William’s obsessive cleanliness had always provided a rich topic for conversation.
    As he grew braver, Davy started on soft parts, spilled brain matter. The goodness hovered up from Matthew Dunvant’s, along with a last supper of partly digested cheese and bread. Except for the sinewy footballers, he found some of the younger colliers quite succulent.
    It was only on the fifteenth day that Davy managed to stand up straight in one of the chamber tunnels. By now his candles were long expired but he found two places where the tiniest glimmers of light filtered through along with rainwater which pooled dangerously now that the pumps were no longer working. His nails now felt strong as he started to scratch on a soft patch of coal