An introduction
What can we do but exchange pleasantries? We grapple with the thought of slapping one another hard, once or twice on the cheek, and lean in for a handshake instead.
Long have I known you and the hatred that brews in steel chambers of your soul for the woman who cost you the long war of your early years.
Still she roams freely, unaware of the invisible lasso you have thrown and are inching closed around her, so when she glimpses it in the corner of a dream in the form of your freckled palm, all of the love in her heart diffuses like an atomic bomb.
But she wakes and claims to remember nothing.
You seek the bitter sting of a cold hand in crisp morning air on the fourth of July in Brooklyn, when you are looking at her eyes unable to see the pigment of the irises you used to know like the back of your hand.
Part one
A phone rang, informing her of a funeral. When the name finally hit her ear from the other side of the continent, she hesitated for one moment, then said,
"To me, he has been dead a long time"
In that moment of hesitation:
The woman's breath did not catch, nor did her grip tighten on the phone. She stared straight at the wall ahead of her, the wrinkles around her mouth constricting in a concentrated frown. She would have seemed indestructible save for the slightest of quivers that started in her knees and grew progressively more severe so she had to sit down and reposition herself when there was a great clearing of throats on the other end of the line:
"Miss, I don't think you understand, he died but this morning,
one hour ago."
Promptly she hung up the phone and downed four pills. She thought to herself that it may have been foolish, that she could not remember the identity of these medicines, then wondered if perhaps they had been candy instead.
Part two
He was in a dream, God did he know it, nostalgia bubbled in the pits of his stomach like a virus. The floor was coated in snow thick as frosting, but only high enough to cover his boots as he trudged through the dense green forrest. Why am I always here, he thought. Soon I will wake up and pretend I didn't feel her in the breaths of air that froze fibres of my lungs.
Years ago, upon his reckoning of the girl's cruelties, he had abandoned seeking her in the labyrinthian trees.
A broken heart bittered his palate, and her dreamland became uninspiring. Conniving bitch, his thoughts echoed.
In most of her dreams, he would walk to the empty stage (used for summer theater, he assumed) and look through the spaces between trees until he could no longer remember where he was and the scenery before him became nothing more than an abstract painting.
All the while she would watch him, hiding just out of his peripheral vision, noticing the way he would squint and tilt his head as if it could help him make sense of the place. Sometimes she spent hours there, just staring at his neck or his hands. Sometimes she'd go up and talk to him, but when they passed each-other at school the next morning, she could see in his eyes that he did not remember their conversations.
This time, when she walked up, he stiffened on stage and arranged his features to look stoic
while his mind cried for gods to turn him to stone.
Then he said, "Hello."
"Shall we preform a play?" the girl asked, voice pitching slightly in anticipation of his typical callousness.
"No," said the boy.
"You know," said the girl, inching closer to him. He could see that she was cold, goosebumps raised up from her bare arms. Her skin looked ancient, thin as paper. He watched blood lie stagnent inside her. Her lips were a deep blue and she looked dead.
He told her so.
"I'm just as trapped as you are, here. Do you think I wish to dream of you every-night?," she said.
At this, the boy smiled. "Who wouldn't want to dream of me?" he said.
She laughed, or at least made all the motions of laughing, but no sound was omitted from her open mouth, and her gasping reminded him too much of his role as the gaping fish, left to dry out on the dock after she had reeled him in, trampled him, and walked away.
Silence returned to the forest, and he looked her over again with the coldest eyes.
"Then why do you do it, why do you bring me here?" the boy snapped. "Haven't you done enough?
Have you not had enough of me?"
"N- no ," the girl said, she was beginning to shake from his palpable fury.
Snow was melting around his ankles, turning the ground to mush.
"I don't mean to," she said. "I can't stop them, you see. It's a nightmare for me to see you so often. It's wrecking me,
it's tearing me apart."
A vein began to throb near the boy's right temple. She wanted to kiss it, feel its warm pulse beneath her frozen lips.
Instead, she fell to the ground and hid her face with her papery hands.
"She ate me up when she realized you weren't coming back. She took all the pure parts that were left of her and devoured them. I think she conjures you only to keep me miserable," the girl said.
"Then, I do not want to hit you," said the boy, his lips softening from their deep frown. "But I will never love you again,
as long as I live."
"Perhaps, that is worse," said the girl as she began sobbing soundlessly.
"You will live with it as I learned to live with the absence of you," the boy said,
then he turned into a deer and gazed at her with the wildest of eyes before bolting into the thicket.
Part three
She awoke in a damp bed, hair matted to her face and neck, reeking of perspiration. The woman groaned as she threw off the layers of bedding she must have pulled on while asleep.
"Always in that fucking snow," she muttered.
As she went through her ritualized morning routine, bits of a phone conversation drifted through her consciousness.
She wondered, briefly, if that had been a sort of prelude to her usual dream, but dismissed the idea when she found her phone blaring its dial-tone on the kitchen floor.
Silently, she put the phone back on its hook and began to pack up her nicest black clothing.
Part Four
She was running through the woods.
She was screaming screaming screaming his name, but her legs were bare, breaking below her.
By the time she reached the lake she was missing four toes and the purple sting of frostbite had crept half-way up her body. She was hands and knees on the ice, skating with her palms. Icicles dawned with the sweat on her brow and she swatted at them as her body trembled.
When he opened his eyes he was not in a forest and this, he thought, was a very good sign.
Still a softer part of him (one he had disposed of long, long ago)
howled in the trenches of his abdomen, mourning the loss of her company.
He silenced it almost instantaneously, but the muffled wail was enough to conjure her name to the whim of his tongue,
and he allowed himself to whisper it only once.
She was lying on the lake in submission when she heard his voice bubble up from a hole in the ice.
Sometimes, while awake and driving down the highway she'd hear the ghost of his voice say her name.
The first time it happened she made the mistake of calling him repeatedly, certain that he was in some sort of trouble.
He picked up on the 24th call, told her to fuck off and hung up.
She didn't try again.
Someone was calling to him, banging on the wall of ice he only now realized was keeping him submerged.
When he finally recognized the voice, he felt something tear through his chest like an arrow.
Suppose I spoke too soon, he thought, moving towards the sound.
Only after hearing her did he begin to feel the pressure to breathe accumulating in his deflated lungs.
However, he remained undecided on the state of his will to live and was weighing his options
when her voice rang out once more above the surface.
"Please, please come up. There is something I must tell you. Something important," she said.
"Tell me, then I will see if I want to come up," he responded defiantly,
watching the girl's figure, morphed through crystalline ice.
The girl sobbed aloud, only once, for his irrefutable stubbornness and the gravity of her following sentiment.
"My love-"
With those two words he felt the entirety of the lake's pressure rest upon him until the boy was sure it had broken every bone in his body. Had he been able to speak he would have told her to fuck off.
Instead, he let himself sink towards the lake floor.
The girl continued:
"They tell me you are gone. They tell me you have died!
but how can I believe them when I see you every night?"
The boy was fading deeper into black lake water.
From the depths there was no sound, but the girl heard his voice clearly in her head:
"Go to the funeral.
There will be no body in that casket. Go to it and see that I am well, then lock your dreams and keep me away.
I long to sleep forever, soundlessly and out of the snow."
"No, no, no! You have to listen! You have to hear me! I cannot face this cold alone."
The girl was clawing at the ice now.
Her fingers became elongated and turned into thin branches,
snapping as they swept the surface.
Part Five
"Coffee?" the woman heard as she was shaken from her sleep. A flight attendant occupied the aisle beside her.
Accepting the cup of steaming liquid if only for the fact that it would warm her hands, she noticed the slightest sense of snow on her clothing. It reminded her of skiing in her youth and returning home with the mountain's chill trapped in her hair.
She thought, it must be the greatest of untruths to go bury his body now, so soon after seeing him.
How could she look his mother in the eye to tell her, "Your son's not dead, not dead at all.
You see, he lives in the corpse of my vestigial goodness."
The End
At the wake, she laid eyes on his dead face. She took in his limp body, his age, the lack of a grimace, and thought that this couldn't be the boy she dreamt of, that it wasn't him at all.
She stayed to watch the tears of all his friends and family stream past her like raindrops on a car,
speeding down the highway.
When the woman dropped dirt on his casket, the wind picked up as if adjusting to her awakening sense of effervescent freedom,
and that night when she closed her eyes only to open them in the resonating whiteness of dreams,
he ran to her and kissed her hard on her lips
until one drop of blood fell to the snow like a treaty
