The Voicemail

The first snow of the year came early, on the second Tuesday of October, and it came all at once.

At two in the afternoon, Sasha was driving north on Highway 63 with forty thousand pounds of groceries behind him: milk, eggs, frozen pizza, apples, and a pallet of birthday cakes for a supermarket in Fort McMurray. The weather forecast that morning had said "light snow, possible flurries." By two fifteen, he could not see the road.

He slowed down to forty kilometres an hour, then thirty. The wipers were working as hard as they could. In front of him, the red lights of a pickup truck appeared and disappeared in the white.

Then his phone rang. Sasha did not answer the phone while driving, ever, not even with the hands-free. He let it ring. A minute later, there was a small sound. Voicemail.

He drove on for twenty minutes until he reached the gas station at Wandering River, where a long line of trucks was already parked with their engines running. The road ahead was closed. A police car with blue and red lights stood across the highway.

Sasha parked, turned off the radio, and listened to the voicemail.