by Daryl Banner
“Wherever it is,” grunts the dwarf, and I suppose on that fact, if anything, we can assuredly agree.
Those are the last words little Lynx mutters. After a long spell of silence, I finally close my eyes and I do precisely what he thinks the world should do: I listen. I hear the tittering of spiders, but it is a tiny, trickling titter. With sick humor, I wonder if I’m hearing the spiders inside of Lynx’s body. They must feel positively at home now, not only within the dark confines of his tiny cave of a body, but they’re embraced within a silken prison that must feel quite familiar, like a mother spider’s womb.
Somehow, the thought makes me less queasy today.
My eyes are still shut, and I know the world will still be there when I open them, if I’m unlucky. With them closed, I let my mind retreat. Strangely, it’s peaceful. It reminds me of the many times back in my rickety house when John would sleep and I’d be happily trapped in his arms all night. Though the hours would pass quickly for me, I spent them dreaming of a future with him. It was an imaginary future where we had children and a big pretty house and there were flowers everywhere.
Trying to recapture that dream, quite suddenly my mind takes a turn. The flowers begin to turn white and grey. When my dream-self peers upward, I realize it is snowing and the bright blue sky is being ever-gently traded for an endless grey one. Winter. Time is shifting. Time is pulling and bending and slowly freezing.
The dream takes me to a house in the deep, frozen north. I know this house but I won’t dare utter the name of whose it is. I know what the person inside this house does not know—that it is her last night to be alive.
The wind howls like a maddened friend, thrashing loudly against the window.
No, her mother told her earlier. You’re not allowed to go. You heard your father. Yet there hangs her mended red dress peacefully in her closet like it were never stabbed with a dinner knife. You did this to yourself, her mother had rudely reminded her. The only one left to blame …
And then I am that girl in the room. I am the girl in the frozen house whose last night alive is about to be experienced. You did this to yourself …
I take the dress off the hanger and, staring at the hole my mother patiently sewed up, that’s when I make the decision.
Gill will be here in two hours. My face is in no condition. The only one left to blame …
I sit at the bathroom counter and gently refine my face for the last time in my life. Where my already-flushed cheekbones jut out, I press subtle smudges of Smoldering Plum. Across my eyelids, a smoky spread of Copper Sunrise with a modest second layer of Peaches & Cream. The lips are dressed with an explosion of Phoenix Fire. I kiss my reflection three times.
I kiss my reflection for the last time, ever.
After I put on my mother’s emerald earrings, I catch my own gaze in the mirror and freeze. My dirty hazel eyes stare back, sharpened by the white-blonde curls that frame my startled expression.
The face in the mirror is one that I strangely do not recognize.
The hum of an engine and the slam of a car door bring me back to rights. I race to the window and thrust it open. The chilly wind bites my face and I squint against it. Peering down the steeply-slanted roof at my friends, I whisper at them in a chokehold of a shout: “Quiet the hell down! My mom will hear you!”
I can barely see his face down there. The only thing that pierces the playful fog are a ghostly pair of headlights. Near them, the vague shape of a pasty boy with spiky black hair. I think that might be Gill, but I can’t be sure. The only thing concerning me is whether or not my mom’s heard them and which pair of shoes I should wear.
My heart drums loudly. Blood forces its way through me with every desperate squeeze of that muscle in my chest. Every breath turns death-white before my face.
I close the window and pick a pair of shoes.
I check my hair one last time.
I peer back at a feather pillow on my bed, a pillow that for two hours became quite intimate with my tears after mom said I couldn’t go. Real, full, Human tears. But here I am, dressed in red, hair fixed like artwork, and invincible green glinting by my ears.
She can’t cage me this time.
My arms slip into a fur coat and I open the window again. The cold attacks me and goose bumps riddle up my slender arms. I shiver once, then carefully swing a leg over the windowsill one at a time. Gently, I bring myself to the edge of the roof and study the furling fingers of fog that tickle the world below. I shiver again.
The. Only. One. Left. To. Blame. Is.
Tossing my heels down with an agitated sigh, I climb barefoot the wooden latticework that runs up the side of the house. The wood digs into my fingers, and I feel the Human sensation of pain. I feel my hands sting from the cold and the unforgiving wood. Twice, I nearly lose my footing, but by the time I reach the ground, it doesn’t matter anyway because I can’t even feel my toes. The high-heeled shoes find my hands again and I’m moving.
“Ready?” a faceless someone asks through the fog.
Hopping toward the limo, I pull on my heels and note with silent disapproval that Gill did not, in fact, wear the vest and bowtie I had said would complement my dress. “Yes.” I can’t hide the irritation in my voice. “Hurry.”
“Cool.” He climbs awkwardly into the limo first. With a frustrated huff, I squeeze my fur coat to suppress a shiver, then slip into the limo without his offered hand I was expecting. He didn’t even say how pretty I look. You should always tell your date how pretty they look.
The limo picks up our friends, too. While they laugh and praise each other’s dresses, I imagine how mad my mom will be when she finds I’m gone. I sneer at the car window thinking about it, my heart racing with dark joy while Gill chugs another plastic cup of champagne.
“My driver would’ve had glass for the champagne,” I complain when he offers me a cup. His glossed-over eyes stare confusedly at me. “I used to have my own driver. And my limo was bigger.” I take a sip—it is so sour—and wrinkle my face. “We had better champagne too.”
“We’re going to the lake house after,” my date says, his wetted eyes drawing a crooked line down my body.
Tonight is more than just some act of defiance against my negligent, broken parents. Tonight, I’m becoming a woman. The girl who would cry over bad birthday presents and lost toys and uprooted residences is dead. I don’t care if my mom won’t witness the lesson I’m teaching myself, if she never knows the independence I’m exhibiting by taking myself to this prom with this boy. I’m not doing it for her. The. Only. One. Left …
“A lake house?” I snort, annoyed. “We’re having the most unusual May weather in recorded history, might as well still be winter. There’s snow and ice everywhere because the heavens clearly want to sabotage this night for me. Besides, isn’t the lake frozen?”
“Yeah, nice,” he says distractedly. Not that I was expecting a horny teenage idiot to listen.
The gym is dressed from rafter to glossy floorboard in a nauseating shade of lilac. Yay for ugly school colors. Tall plastic vases are vomiting carnations in every corner of the room. The tables are bookended by paper trees and expressionless chaperones that appear more like gargoyles than people. I feel tempted to touch one simply to prove they’re actually alive and haven’t turned to stone.
Gill’s hand touches the small of my back. A tingle runs up my spine and plays into the hairs of my neck when he says, “Want some punch?”
I hate school punch, but the other girls already have cups in their hands, so I tell him yes. Lined like pigeons on a fence, the unclaimed boys and girls stand at the rim of the dance floor like some arcane power forbids them to cross it, and I ignore the boys that stare at me as I wait for Gill to return. It irritates me to no end that they all stare. If they wanted a date, they should’ve asked any of the girls who are just as pathetically stranded and dressed up for no one. My eyes meet none of theirs; I’m watching the boys that matter on the dance floor, the ones that aren’t laz
y and dateless, and I’m lifting my chin high so the cute ones see my good side.
An hour later when Gill and I are slow-dancing among our circle of good-looking friends, I rest my chin against his warm neck and watch the other boys over his shoulder. The tall baseball boy Georgi and his stupid girlfriend are near the wall. His hot friends Torin and Darryn are nearby, their girls hooked to each arm like algae eaters on the glass of an aquarium with their fat puckered lips. They even dance like fish, clumsy feet and ugly hair. I’m so much prettier than them. Why did I say yes to Gill? I could’ve held out and had any of those three. I’m so much prettier than Myra or Jess or … whoever that ugly one with the big ears is.
“What do you wanna do later? Still up for the lake house?” Gill’s breath tickles my ear, sends an unexpected snake of electricity down my body and I feel my stomach move. Distracted as I am by the sight of yet another beautiful boy I could’ve waited for, Sascha, captain of the wrestling team, I can’t even answer Gill because I’m so struck with how ugly Sascha’s date Tina is. I mean, her hair looks like a greasy curtain. Does she even wash it?
In the limo afterwards, Gill still won’t shut up. “Do you think when, like, we’re older,” he keeps on, his breath reeking of soured punch and pretzels, “that we’ll even remember tonight? I mean, prom is like, a rite of passage or whatever, but isn’t it also, like …” He chuckles stupidly and a fleck of his saliva lands on my cheek. I wipe it off, disgusted. “I forgot what I was gonna say. Hey, do you smell that?”
I sigh and ask Bethany to borrow her makeup mirror.
The champagne runs out and the girls are laughing hysterically, falling over their guffawing dates as the limo takes a sharp left turn. They’re laughing and laughing until their mascara’s running in oily black tears to their chins. Even Gill’s snorting, his every chortle colored with sprays of punch saliva, and I can’t fathom how these lowlifes can even guzzle such cheap, horrid champagne.
I miss my mansion by the beach. I miss my driver. I miss my stupid friends and that boy I almost kissed. Nothing decent comes from a person who doesn’t make right by her wrongs.
I press five fingers to my chest and feel my heartbeat.
Recalling my mom’s last words to me through the laughter of drunken girls, I scowl at the window and consider whether this was all worth it. Really, prom wasn’t all that. Forgettable. Lame. Even the punch tasted like regret and cheap candy, dead after the first sip.
The lake house draws close and I take in a deep lungful of oxygen, then release it, emptying my lungs to the world. That, friends, was a Human sigh of relief.
You did this to yourself.
When the wasted others have dispersed into the big unsupervised house, various lights flicking on in all the rooms of the creaky wooden beast, Gill pulls me across the wraparound porch and lifts me onto the railing.
This is where he kisses me. It’s so cold, the touch of his lips to mine, I hardly feel it. It’s like kissing the Dead. I’d worry that our kissing should feel warmer, but I’m too busy studying my reflection in the window, making sure my hair doesn’t fall out of place. He keeps running his hand through it, his fingers pulling apart all my carefully-placed pins. It’s really annoying.
It’s so, so, so cold … but I’m more concerned about my hair and totally not thinking of that last thing my dad said to me in the hospital, sick and on the brink of death as he is from the cut of rusted metal he got … that foreboding thing he said about how there’s more than one poison than can kill a person … how there’s a poison of the soul.
“Let’s go to the lake,” he whispers in my ear.
It’s so, so cold, but he’s invited me to the lake, and maybe it’s there that I’ll become a woman.
My name is Winter, Winter Steel, but right now I am this stupid girl in my dreams, this stupid Living girl, and I’m on my way to the lake. Through frozen wilderness, I hug my furs tightly, far more tightly than I’m holding him, and for the first time, I notice how nervous he is. He giggles between all his sentences, stuttering, talking about the dumbest things. It weirds me out. “Let’s go back.”
“We’re almost there,” he says, eyeing my chest. When I see the hunger in his eye, I’m struck suddenly by the fact that, for all the boys I’ve let kiss me or run fingers through my hair, I’ve never had sex.
I know this. I’ve known this. It’s why I said yes. Why is it suddenly coming to me like some sort of surprise?
Gill says, “I’m pretty sure we’re almost there.” His eyes flick to the east, to the west, to the north. He’s lost and I’m lost, and everything is whiteness and darkness. I’m surrounded by trees on all sides. This is the first and the last woods in which I will ever be lost. This snow beneath my feet, the final snowfall I’ll ever know.
“C-Can we go back now?” I’m hugging myself so tight and my chest is a hollow pit of frost.
And then his face is in mine, blocking out the world. The silvery night sky and blurred moonlight behind him, all his features are gone and I’m about to make out with Death. “You smell nice,” the shadow whispers, shapeless. The mist of his breath is the only evidence he exists.
“I c-c-can’t smell anything. It’s so f-f-freaking cold.”
He puts a hand at the back of my head. I feel nothing. “Let me warm you up.”
“I’m so, so cold.”
The snow-blanketed terrain embraces our bodies as we drop, pressing into it, our weight and our gravity uniting us like a lodestone. The shadow devours me, its lips pressing into mine with a sensation that’s somewhere between gentle and slimy. His breath makes jagged, shuddery sounds. I want his kisses to grow warmer the longer they go on, but they only grow wetter.
“Cold?”
My mouth so occupied by his, I can’t respond to him. Frozen, I want to say. Can we go back? But my heart is racing and I’m wondering what’s about to happen. I’m just as curious as I am excited. I’m rushing to the doors of a great palace that, all my life I’ve been running towards, and I’m only now about to see what’s inside.
With my big stupid Human eyes, I’m about to see.
He runs a clumsy hand to my coat buttons and I feel them release, one by one. His nose bumps mine when he returns his attention to my face, kissing me. He’s shaking and I can’t tell if he’s shivering or if he’s as eager as I am. Or nervous. Or whatever the hell we are.
We’re young. There’s blood thrusting its way through every part of our bodies. The winter freeze threatens to choke us with its greedy fingers of black ice. The winter threatens to choke us so passionately I fear I can’t breathe. The winter and my mother’s last words threaten to choke me. The winter and my mother’s last words and … and …
“Wait,” I breathe as his icy lips reach my neck, as my coat is opened and the white mists blind me.
Do you think we live one life to prepare for the next one? Do you think we live a million lives to prepare for the perfect one that’s soon to come? Is it the next life? Is it a million lives from now? Is it never?
“Wait.” But he doesn’t wait. My coat opens. My dress is opening, the red tear where my mother had stitched it, stitch by stitch, stitch by stitch, I feel myself opening, and the winter winds whisper in my ears—I can swear it’s speaking to me: You are the only one left to blame, Winter. That’s what it says to me, as if I’m the winter. The only one left to blame is you, Winter. Why do the whispers call me winter? I’m pressing two numb hands to Gill’s chest, pushing him off me, but it’s as effective as pushing into a stone wall. You did this to yourself, Winter.
“Claire?”
I open my eyes and suddenly it isn’t Gill over me.
It’s Grim.
He stares down on me, light spilling on his pale, sullen face from the moon or the snow, his eyes ravenous, his nose blushed the color of angry blood, his cheeks like cherries. It’s Grim, but he’s different … and he’s alive.
“I don’t want this,” I tell him, I tell the different Grim. The wind bites my face. I�
�m shivering. My eyes sting.
He looks hurt. “You … You don’t want me?”
There’s poisons of the mind, my dad told me. Poisons of the soul. There’s so many things in my life that I wanted. So many things as a child that I got. I only had to cry loud enough. My every horrible action was rewarded with a doll, or a car, or a pretty red dress …
But the more I took, the less I seemed to have.
“Stop it,” I tell his hand, which runs up the side of my body, as if his icy fingers could convince me of changing my mind. “Get off me.”
Suddenly the joy is ended, and he slumps off my body, kneeling in the snow next to me. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks—Grim asks—his breath turning to fog before his face. He flushes redder by the second.
“Y-You’re the poison,” I spit at him, angry that I let him take me out into this cold waste. And for what? The trees all look dead. The lake is nowhere. The wind cuts angrily through the woods like a million knives and we’re out here freezing in the midst of it. I can’t feel my feet, my fingers, my anything. “You’re p-p-poisoning me.”
“Whatever, crazy bitch.” Snow is kicked up into my face as he stumbles to his feet. It isn’t until I’ve wiped my eyes clear that I see he’s marched away.
“Hey!” I cry out, but I’m met with a mouthful of snow and he doesn’t stop. In the furling curtains of wind and white and grey, he’s out of sight in a matter of seconds. “G-G-Gill! C-Come back here!”
I don’t even know if his name’s Gill anymore. The dream is getting confused. Something’s wrong.
“G-G-Grim!” Which name did I call out?
I fight with the snow, struggling to get to my feet. I chase after him, driven suddenly by a fear that he could actually ditch me out here in the frozen waste. I march against the wind in the direction I’m quite certain he’s gone. The cold fights my every step, and I’ve already gone too far when I realize I didn’t even grab my four-hundred dollar fur coat, still lying back there in the snow, likely buried by now.