“Hey, you’re back! I didn’t expect you so soon, how did the scavenging go?”

I twitched, sending the vile of fizzing liquid shattering upon the laboratory floor tile where it began to smolder into the cracks. I hadn’t expected her either. Her energetic voice had caught me off guard.

“Oh Blake, what did I tell you about playing with the liquid nitrogen again?” she giggled. “You could kill yourself!” she joked, but I had lost the ability to laugh for a while now.

With a dreary gaze I looked at her, my gray eyes pitiful against her bright green. I had only known Shanna for about a week, but she had this unique quality of causing my tense muscles to relax as she carried with her an air of tranquility wherever she went. I murmured,

“There was an 8.2 in Egypt today – killing hundreds of innocents. The tornado in Russia…”

My voice trailed off as Shanna stayed quiet raising an eyebrow. She pursed her lips. My mouth gaped. It opened and closed but no sound escaped as water welled into my eyes. I think it’s important to note that I’m not a sentimental person at all – but the thought that I’m responsible for thousands of deaths in our already dwindling population is not something I can take lightly. So I found myself telling her.
I told her of the abandoned Alaskan village I had travelled to a few months before, the boarded up shacks covered with snow looking like gingerbread houses that children had forgotten to eat and the loot that they had inside. Cans upon cans of food, flint, and seal fat – the necessities we needed; but also some luxuries. I told her of the harp that I had miraculously come across, lodged in between two cliffs of ice so brilliantly that if the sun hadn’t caused a flicker of gold to catch my glance, the jagged ice would have cradled the treasure until Judgment Day, but that I – clever as I am – had found it. And I took it. And how I ran, quickly bounding from one foot to the next as if someone was watching me, and how it turned out that someone was. She had appeared in a bright light that blinded my eyes as its beam bounced off of the ice precipice – Blizzard. The Goddess. I told her of the Blizzards’ silver hair moving sinuously about her skin glittering a pale color of death. And her booming voice that demanded I return her precious musical instrument before I had caused any more trouble. ‘Trouble?’ I had asked, flashing a grin before tauntingly stroking the harp strings that resonated a scale of high pitches about the ice, and how Blizzard paused, mid-glide with a look of devastation.

I told her of the vibrations of the harp strings that grew larger and larger after I had played them until the entire body of the harp had begun to shake, until the very earth below the harp and I began to shake, until the gingerbread like houses began to shake, until the jagged ice cliffs began to shake and caused a mount of snow to fall upon Blizzard, and buried her beneath it. I told her of how with a small sneeze the harp had come to life, quivering and calling out for the Goddess with its small soprano voice, and how with each frightened shaking of its golden limbs the ground shook, or the sky flashed bright sticks to the ground, or the oceans swelled, and I had known that I had birthed a very troublesome thing indeed. I told her of how I had dropped the shuddering harp right there, and I had ran, until I stopped here, a mile underwater in the safest place I could think of, away from quivering harps and angry ice queens.

And that’s when I told Shanna of how I had planned on drinking that vile of liquid nitrogen, or of any concoction for that matter, to end my guilt of the talking disaster-causing-harp – when Shanna laughed. She was always doing that, laughing.