We found them after this year’s snowmelt. The dark, formless things. Looking like they’d been dredged up from some abyss. Had they fallen from the sky with the snow? Emerged from the crevices below? Had the ice metamorphosed, angry as we trampled it?

Snowfall that year had been peculiar. Winter settled in like an intrusive thought, persistent and unkind. But the snow didn’t come, not at first. Like we’d put it off, told ourselves we could do without it. I recall wondering if it would ever come. But the snow did arrive, eventually. Torrents of it. Sheets of it. Blankets of it. I came out one morning to find it there. Surprised and relieved, I had to scrape it off my car and was late for work. I parked several blocks away from the office and as I walked it continued coming down. A whole damned lake’s worth of water falling in fat flakes, sticking to clothes and hair and eyes. Searing the flesh of my cheeks. By the time I was driving home, cars had piled up on the motorway. People trudged like refugees through falling ash.

By the next day, it had stopped falling and didn’t come again for the rest of winter. Scientists had no explanation for this peculiar phenomenon. They put it down to a changing climate, shifting weather patterns, the lower temperature of an intercontinental deep-sea current. The snow that had fallen froze solid in the cold days that followed, became hard, lumpy. I’d slip and twist my ankle often as I walked across it. For weeks and months it remained like this, a layer between us and the earth like a new crust had formed.

Winter finally ended with the spring thaw. The hard packed snow was slowest to melt, at first just turning to sludge at the edges. Then I woke one morning, surprised to see the last of it gone, just as I’d been surprised when it arrived. And in its wake, these things. Dark forms. Glistening and wet, like they too might melt away. Like they’d crawled up out of the ocean. Like we’d vomited them out.

I recall seeing one on the driveway outside my house. A black mass smaller than my palm, with a long, translucent trail quivering in the breeze. When my cat found it, he sniffed it and carried on. Like him, I ignored it. I wanted nothing to do with it. I turned my back to it and drowned out thoughts of it. At night I watched inane videos online so I wouldn’t think of anything at all.

But then new videos crept into my social feeds. Videos of people touching them. Picking them up. Videos of people eating them in one slippery gulp, like a large oyster. The more I saw, the more riveted I became. I’d stay up all night, watching. The blobs had arrived outside people’s homes, just waiting to be noticed. Waiting to be acknowledged. Waiting to be touched and felt.

The black mass in my driveway remained there, still glistening and wet weeks after the snow was gone. I continued trying to ignore it but after more time – perhaps it took me months – eventually I approached it. I dared not touch it, wanting first to find out what the government might say, what the scientists might recommend. But the headlines remained silent. They were talking instead about the intractable war far away, spilling out into the region. Like it was an unfortunate oil spill seeping into the soil of our souls.

No official reports were commissioned, no press releases issued. No-one I knew was talking about them. All I could find online was conspiracy theories and vitriol. And videos of people touching them, picking them up, swallowing them. I obsessed over the way they slipped past people’s lips, leaving black stains in their wake. Some people denied they existed or claimed they were fake. The feeds that amazed me most were the ones that didn’t comment on them at all, just carried on as if all the world was as it always had been.

Eventually, I decided to do something about it. Facing it each morning was unbearable. I made a plan and found plastic bags and sticks and dustpans. I’d scoop it up and throw it in the bin. Be done with it. Move on.

One Sunday I put my plan into action. I had a plastic bag ready. I put the dustpan inside it, laid these on the driveway beside my black mass. I intended to prod the oozing substance onto the dustpan, then carry the whole lot to the bin.

But when the moment came, something in me stirred. I didn’t use the sticks, or the dustpan, or the plastic bags. I picked it up with my bare fingers. Eyes closed, weeping a little, I remembered the bitter cold of snowfall, the way it seared the skin of my cheeks and the fat flakes caking in my beard. I let the mass slip past my lips and down my throat.

It tasted like the salt of tears. It tasted of tar and ash. It tasted of rotted flesh and putrid, hate-filled hearts. It was not easy to swallow.

I look at my fingers and see how it stains me. In the mirror, I see my lips are stained also.

I feel it stains my innards. It sits heavy in my belly. At times, the taste of it – the burning ash – rises up like bile in the back of my throat and brings tears to my eyes. In those moments my cat sleeps in the crook of my arm until I’m restful again.

In the streets I recognise others who’ve also eaten their masses by the stains on their fingers and their lips. When we pass each other, we look away, not for lack of fellow feeling but because it is too much to face. The weight is too much. And there are more of us every day.

Image: Giorgio Trovato