?Interrobang! · Track 69 · middle
Who Warms the One Who Warms Others
OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): private items tied to a very private treatment. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): Cold Feet Fiona — bed-warmer from cold-country inns; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: the remote southern coast of Novaya Zemlya. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Fiona warmed strangers' beds with coals though her name is Cold Feet; left her private treatment-items on a frozen Arctic coast. Who warms the one who warms everyone else?
Lyrics
Southern coast of Novaya Zemlya. Tundra and the memory of a bomb. I found your bag near an abandoned izba. They called you Cold Feet Fiona. But your job was warmth. The George Inn, 1842. A brass pan full of glowing peat. Down the cold hall, past the snoring merchants. You slid the heat between their linen sheets. A stranger's comfort, for a few coins. But who warms the warmer? Who brings the coals for your own cold feet? Who walks the dark hall to your own small room? Who makes sure you don't freeze? Your bag didn't hold a brass pan. No earthenware bottle, no charred peat. Just these modern vials. These blister packs, with the days of the week punched out. This prescription, folded a hundred times. A private treatment for a cold that never leaves. You carried it all the way to the permafrost. But who warms the warmer? Who brings the coals for your own cold feet? Who walks the dark hall to your own small room? Who makes sure you don't freeze? Did you feel the flash in 1961? A sun born and died in the same minute. A heat that melted rock, then left a deeper winter. Is that what it was like for you? One moment of warmth, and then this... this long polar night. This need for a treatment you left by the Barents Sea. Just the wind now, Fiona. The wind and your question. Who warms the one... ...who warms everyone else?