New Year's resolution

Fasting once a week could help you live longer

The Telegraph, 19 February 2012

Peter didn’t plan to go so long

without eating. He wasn’t aiming

for a mention in the Guinness

book of fools, freaks and unfortunates.

But he had over-indulged,

and so resolved

as his tyre chains bit into the forest

road home to lose the surplus,

shed the spare, kick

the snacking habit, maybe

next year.

When New Year came

he had already been fourteen days

in the belly of a Volvo stalled

at the side of a glacial road.

Stalactites of his breath tinselled

the rear view mirror, a yellow pond

had frozen where Peter’s feet would be. 

The winding windows in the back opened

onto his larder, where

the richness of Swedish vocabulary

lent variety to his diet

of snow.

Peter didn’t know a month had flown

by. He’d seen through the snow

that the sun had risen and not

set again, and now his white

cocoon sparkled like iced champagne.

Since his body quit

shivering nothing moved, and without movement

what is time? His breathing was shallow and silent.

The silence convinced Peter

he was deaf

or dead. When the world

broke through

Peter’s Volvo-centred igloo,

and green and blue

gushed in

with a scorching

pine-laced gale to the rasping

of blades, the breaking

of seals, he had nothing

to offer his guests.

‘Eat,’ he told Officer Nyberg,

‘snow.’

Peter Skyliberg was found awake and able to speak after spending over two months trapped in his snow-buried car on a Swedish forest road. Scientists think he may have gone into a hibernation state in which his body conserved energy by lowering its temperature.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet