Where I End and You Begin

by Andra Brynn

  The trip to Nompton is easy by now, but Daniel turns off on a different street than normal. “I want to show you the church,” he says. “I’ve seen some pictures and it looks really cool.”

  I nod and have to smile at the thought of a failing priest taking me to a dead church. It’s almost appropriate. We travel down streets full of dilapidated houses and old stores with faded signs and empty windows. The town is dying, I realize, and it makes me sad. What must it be like to live in a place that is dying? Does some of it rub off on you?

  I sneak a look at Daniel and wonder if we’re just death tourists, dipping into decay for a thrill before retreating again.

  “Here it is,” he says suddenly, and I turn to look.

  A cemetery is outside my window, ancient headstones and broken crosses, and just beyond it sits a clapboard structure that must once have been white, but the rotting wood beneath shows through the last remnants of the paint. Few windows dot the sides, but a bell tower stands at the front, the cross on the top jutting into the cloudy sky.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “Yeah, it’s beautiful,” Daniel says. “I’d stop here, but it’s way too cold and windy, since we can’t go inside.”

  “Why not?” I ask, but I already know the answer. This church must have been built a long, long time ago. The whole thing could come down at any moment.

  “Unstable,” he says. “Too much fiddling around and everything collapses.”

  I look at him sharply, but his words are entirely innocent and I turn back to the window. “Where’s the house we’re going to see?”

  “Farther north,” he says, turning the car around. “The pictures of this one are really beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?”

  “In a run-down, beat-up sort of way.”

  I nod. I know exactly what he means.

  He drives the car through more meandering streets, until the town peters out and he turns off onto a long, dirt road leading into a thick woods. A queer sense of anticipation rises in me as we drive, the sense that we are trespassing somehow, in a place where we don’t belong. Of course, that always begs the question: if we don’t belong, who does?

  The answer comes to me as the dirt road fades and Daniel stops the car. “This is as far as we can go on wheels,” he says. We get out, but Daniel doesn’t move around to the trunk.

  “No light?” I ask him.

  “Don’t need one,” he says. “Natural light is the best anyway. Come on.” He jerks his chin toward a dim path through the trees, and I swallow my apprehension and follow him.

  The path gets thicker and denser as we walk, and only twenty feet in I am glad for the umbrella that Daniel has loaned me. Though the woods cut the wind, leaving us warmer, the trees are not happy at our passage. It’s not much, but I can use the umbrella to billy-club my way through grasping branches and snagging undergrowth. There are few times in life when the words, ‘everything would have been better if only I’d had a machete’ are truly applicable, but I think that this may, in fact, be one of them.

  “Just a little further,” Daniel says. He points into the trees. I follow his eyes and see an old shack, fallen over, its dead wood a heap of useless timber fit only for firewood. Cracks and broken boards jut out into the surrounding trees, as splintery as a matchstick house.

  “What’s that?” I say. I don’t like how quiet it is out here. My voice is loud, an intrusion, and every time the wind picks up I shiver, listening for things moving.

  “Just an old storage shed,” Daniel says. “It’s right by the old house, so we’re close.” He forges ahead and I follow him, my heart beating in my throat, my pulse fluttering in my wrists.

  Then, as though by magic, the woods retreat a little, and we are standing in front of the old house.

  It’s not a mansion, like Daniel said, but it might have been back when it was built. Three stories and probably a basement underground, the structure is mostly brick with wood trim and a wooden porch in the front. Plants have grow up around it, crawling up the facade, sprawling over the steps like unwelcome visitors. A place that once was human, falling back into nature.

  A corpse of a house, I think, returning to the dust from which it came.

  Daniel tests the porch steps, and, finding them solid, gestures to me to climb with him. “This way,” he says. I follow, the chill of the weather seeping further and further into me.

  Inside, the house is a mess. A riot of objects, tossed about by the trespassing winds. Books cover the floor, old magazines, papers. The living room furniture is still here, threadbare and ugly, yet still arranged around the fireplace as though the original occupants of the house decided one day that they were tired of it all, that they needed only a begging bowl and a walking stick, and left this world behind.

  How does a place like this become abandoned? What does it mean when everything is left as it was, except the thing it was made for has gone?

  I’m glad we decided to come here, because it’s not as riotously chaotic as either the hospital or the school. It’s easier to find our way through the mounds of discarded things, and the windows have all broken out, their curtains long ago ripped or rotted away, and the gray light of the coming winter illuminates everything with a curious glow.

  I tread lightly, and the floorboards creak beneath my steps. Trees are coming in through the windows, and the slight breeze ruffles the pages of the books strewn about the floor. I stop and kneel down, curious as to which books are here. One of them flutters beneath my hands, like a bird with broken wings, struggling to fly.

  Gently, not wanting to alarm it, I fold it over and look at the title page, the cover long gone.

  Moby Dick.

  A little bell rings in my brain. Coincidences. Curiosities. There are all sorts of coincidences in this life. And who doesn’t have a copy of Moby Dick, besides me?

  Licking my lips, I stand. Daniel is snapping pictures like it’s the end of the world and he wants to document every last moment, leaving it behind for the aliens to find when they come at last, too late to save us.

  I press forward, wandering into the kitchen.

  The cupboards stand open and empty except for the corpses of leaves inside. Dirt films the tiled counters, and the dead shells of beetles are clustered along the cracks. Smashed plates crunch under my feet.

  I move through the kitchen, around through a little parlor where overturned chairs greet me, their spiraled springs exposed like bones. Outside the broken window, I hear a crow call. I always hate to hear crows call, unless there are two of them. One for sorrow. It’s always one for sorrow, no matter what bird poem you are reciting, or which bird it’s for. I pause and listen for another crow to answer, but none does.

  I keep going, moving the books on the floor out of my way, and I idly wonder where all these books came from, since there are no bookshelves that I can see, and most of them are missing their covers.

  Homeless words in unbound pages flash at me as another breeze wends its way through the house, and I shiver in my coat.

  I don’t want to be here on the bottom floor any more. The place looks sad, ransacked. For a moment I have the curious feeling that I am just in a lower part of hell, the wrong place for me. If I climb higher, I’ll find a neat, ornately decorated purgatory, exactly as it was left so long ago. I exit the parlor and enter the living room again.

  There’s no sign of Daniel. He’s moved on to the kitchen, probably, and I don’t want to bother him. I’m sure he’s too involved in taking pictures to want to speak to me. I don’t mind. I like the solitude of these old places. I like walking through them and feeling my own impermanence.

  I’m starting to like the idea of impermanence. People like to say this, too, shall pass, but when you are in the throes of your life, it never seems like it will end.

  I turn toward the stairs sitting at one end of the living room. They look quite solid, but I test the first one with my umbrella anyway. It doesn’t give at all. Whatever wood used for it was thick
and hard to stand the test of time. I put a foot out and begin to climb.

  The house complains as I mount each step, and I want to tell it to hush, to go back to sleep. At the turn of the landing, there is a huge window, now only a skeleton without its glassy skin.

  I pause and look outside.

  Half-bare trees look back at me, their sad branches rustling in the wind, knocking together like muted chimes. I feel the chill of the air on my face, and smell the scent of ice again, a ghostly scent, a sharp scent. I watch as a tiny bird alights on a branch, gives a small, sad chirp, listens for someone to answer her, and then takes wing again.

  I feel like a bird, sometimes, I think. My bones are sometimes as hollow as bird bones. I call and call in my own bird call, but I can’t find anyone who will call back.

  I frown, turn, and climb up the second small flight of stairs, toward the landing, but when I reach the top, I pause.

  The room in front of me is rotten. Huge holes gape in the floor, a desk is turned over, a lone chair sits across the gap of decay. It is not possible to wander into this part of the house, and though the layout is such that I can see into the rooms beyond, can see they are austere, full of dusty armoires and old beds, I cannot cross the divide to see them. They are preserved in time and space. I cannot reach them.

  With a sigh, I sink down to the top step and run a hand over my face. I am suddenly tired, as though all my hopes had been pinned on climbing higher, but now I am stuck here. The light of the gray day streams in through the window, falling across me, and I turn my face to it and close my eyes. I need to rest, just for a moment.

  The sound of a camera wakes me, but I don’t open my eyes. The air is cold around me, almost icing on my eyelashes, and I want to stay asleep where it’s warm for just a bit longer.

  Then the camera clicks again, and I have to wake up. I open my eyes and look down at Daniel, standing on the lower landing, his camera pointed up at me.

  “You’re taking pictures of me?” I say, but when the camera comes down, I have to bite my tongue in order not to gasp.

  An expression of shock is on his face, etched into every line. His full lips parted, his eyes wide, a faraway look about him, as though he has been staring into another world.

  “You just...” he says. “You just looked beautiful.”

  My stupid, traitorous heart leaps at the sound of the word in his mouth.

  Beautiful.

  He continues. “The light coming in from the window, the dust and cobwebs around you... and you were asleep. You looked like a doll someone had left on the steps...” He shakes his head. “You were beautiful.”

  I don’t know what to say. “Thank you?”

  He shakes his head. “No, don’t thank me. Thank you. That was...” He trails off, and then we are staring at each other, I on the steps above, and he on the landing below, and suddenly I see it. The broken window behind him, shining on his golden hair. His brown eyes, dark in a pale face. He is fading in the light, even as I watch him, blending in to the decay around us, a shocked statue of a man turned to stone by the strength of his revelation. I am Medusa. I am the face of a goddess of old, too beautiful to resist, too terrible to behold and yet live.

  A gust of wind swoops through the window, lifting the hair from my face, and I close my eyes and breathe it in, feeling it burn through my throat, feeling it turn my insides to ice, numbing me through and through.

  “Oh,” Daniel says. “Shit.”

  The spell shatters. I open my eyes and look down at him. He is no longer staring at me, but up and up, at the snowflakes swirling in.

  .0.

  There are ghosts of winter. Ghosts of snow and starvation. I read a story about one, a long time ago, but I can hardly remember it because it scared me so badly that every time I heard its name afterward I would not listen.

  Windigo. A creature of snow and ice, a lipless mouth, whose footprints are filled with blood. The windigo is a story from the first nations, the first people on this continent, back when ice still moved and heaved over the land, back when there were times that the winter lasted half a year or longer. A windigo is a man who, succumbing to starvation, has committed the sin of cannibalism, and so becomes a monster for his crime. A windigo will eat those it loved most in life. A windigo is always starving. A windigo devours people, unable to fill its belly.

  This is terror—that our own drive to survive will lead us to the unforgivable. That we become mindless with need and in our quest to fulfill it we will destroy everyone around us.

  This is horror—that one we loved and trusted will turn on us, and open their mouth, and swallow us whole.

  .16.

  The snow falls faster and harder than I’ve ever seen any snow fall before.

  “A snowstorm,” Daniel says grimly once we step outside the old house. “We need to get back as soon as possible.”

  “We got ice storms in Oklahoma,” I say. “Sometimes snow storms.”

  “Boston got buried in snow all the time,” he tells me. “But there were snowplows and things to deal with it. Out here everyone goes a little crazy about it, and no one plows the highways. Not to mention I don’t have the right kind of tires...I need to get you back to the dorms right now.”

  His voice is low and steady, but hidden inside it I detect a thin note of panic, and I follow him through the flying white flakes toward the car.

  But snow, like fog, seems to do something strange to time. Stretch it out, make it huge or small, depending on where you are. It warps the space around you, and by the time we make it to the car there is already a half inch of snow on it.

  Daniel swears. “I didn’t bring gloves,” he says. “That was stupid.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” I tell him. I slip my coat sleeve over my hand and help him wipe away the snow on the windshield. My coat is a huge felt thing ten sizes too big that I got on sale for almost nothing, and it protects my hands, but Daniel is not so lucky. His sweatshirt is soaked through instantly, and his fingers bright red by the time he is done. There’s no time to waste, however, and we both jump into the car.

  The engine is cold and takes a few heart-stopping seconds to turn over, but then it finally kicks on, and Daniel inches it around and around in a circle, until we are facing the opposite way. Unfortunately, the gravel road is almost impossible to see now, and the night is beginning to lower.

  Daniel presses down on the gas and the back wheels spin on snow and ice and gravel. We both hold our breath as he eases up, then slowly bounces the car into some vague sort of forward momentum, but when he tries to go faster the wheels spin out again.

  The tense quarter hour it takes to drive down the old road to the main highway is plenty of time for the snow to begin dumping down in buckets, filling up the roads, and when we are at last headed back toward the school, we have slowed to a crawl.

  The car slips and slides against the snow, and there is no path forged by through traffic. Daniel is squinting into the dying light, the flakes flashing against his headlights. We manage about twenty miles an hour until the car starts to spin out, the back end losing traction, and we have to slow down. The snow picks up even more, until we can hardly see, and well after an hour we reach the outskirts of town and Daniel is ready to break from the stress.

  White drifts change the landscape around us, smoothing it out, making it hard to find purchase.

  “My apartment,” Daniel says suddenly.

  I almost jump out of my skin. “What?” I say.

  “My apartment. It’s near here.”

  I remember, of course, that it’s closer to the edge of town than the college, but I’m not sure what to say, so I stay silent.

  Daniel licks his lips. “I think we should go to my apartment and wait out the storm.”

  I swallow. “Okay,” I say. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  There is a tension in the air as I agree, something thick and soft, hard to hear through. But Daniel nods, and his white-knuckled grip on the steer
ing wheel relaxes.

  “Okay,” he says, almost to himself, and inches the car forward.

  It is dark by the time we reach his apartment building, the streetlights barely shining through the haze of snow falling down around them. The light of the city bounces off the clouds, bathing everything in an eerie glow.

  When at last we are in a parking spot—or a place that might be a parking spot, it’s hard to tell—I’m exhausted from the tension. My back is a knot of stress, and when I open the car door to get out a gust of cold wind comes in, splattering me with snowflakes, like tiny splinters ripping through the air.

  “Come on,” Daniel says. “We need to get inside.”

  No shit, I think, but I know he’s just trying to be helpful. I step out of his car and my feet sink into the fresh-fallen snow. And they keep sinking, until it’s halfway up my shins, soaking my blue jeans through and bathing me in ice. My teeth start to chatter immediately, and when Daniel rounds the car to take my hand, I cling to it gladly.

  Together we struggle up the stairs to the third floor. It’s not much better up here, the old concrete building absorbing the cold like a sponge, and the open breezeways creating miniature wind tunnels. When Daniel at last opens his door, we stumble inside together, exhausted and shivering.

  He shuts the door and locks it.

  “Wow,” he says. “I...I didn’t expect that.”

  I shake my head. “Me, either. What kind of autumn is it when you get a snowstorm in October?”

  “It’s late October,” Daniel says, as if this makes it better.

  “It’s stupid October,” I counter, and then my teeth begin to chatter in earnest.

  Daniel rakes a hand through his hair as he watches me plop down in the middle of the floor and peel my shoes and soaked socks off. My feet are blocks of ice, and when I reach down to rub them they are so cold they startle even me.