Explore "A Rocket of Iron" by Voltairine De Cleyre on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was one of those misty October nightfalls of the north, when the white fog creeps up from the river, and winds itself like a corpse-sheet around the black, ant-like mass of human insignificance, a cold menace from Nature to Man, till the foreboding of that irresistible fatality which will one day lay us all beneath the ice-death sits upon your breast, and stifles you, till you start up desperately crying, "Let me out, let me out!"
For an hour I had been staring through the window at that chill steam, thickening and blurring out the lines that zigzagged through it indefinitely, pale drunken images of facts, staggering against the invulnerable vapor that walled me in -- a sublimated grave marble. Were they all ghosts, those figures wandering across the white night, hardly distinguishable from the posts and pickets that wove in and out, like half-dismembered bodies writhing in pain? My own fingers were curiously numb and inert; had I, too, become a shadow?