Page 23 of Seasonal Fears

Harry hesitates. He doesn’t want to leave when his father is clearly fighting with Melanie’s, wants to go over there and make a joke, to keep the peace the way he always does, the way he always has. But Melanie is looking at him with such anxiety in her eyes, and he’s not sure how she’s having such an easy time handling all of this (unless her heart really has stopped beating, says a small, traitorous part of him, a little voice he doesn’t want to listen to; all this would be easy to believe with irrefutable proof at hand), but he’s sure he needs to wipe that look off her face, whatever it means.

So Harry puts the car in reverse and backs away, and in an instant’s time, he’s driving away.

Somehow it feels like nothing so much as running away from home.

Sleeping Beauty

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 11TH, 2017: WINTER, UNDER THE WORM MOON.

At the exact moment William Monroe’s heart stops, so does Melanie Cosgrove’s. It’s like flipping a switch, one thing resulting in another, without any gap between them. But that isn’t the only thing that happens in that instant. This would be a much shorter, much kinder story if it were.

When Melanie’s heart stops beating, another heart starts.

The rhythm of its motion is slow at first, each muscular contraction followed by the smallest of pauses, but they gather speed quickly, becoming something steady, becoming something new. After a few minutes have passed (Melanie lying dead and growing cool on the football field), the heart’s owner takes her first shuddering breath in seventeen years.

A moment after that, Melanie opens her eyes, unmoving heart still silent in her chest, and the newly wakened girl does the same. She blinks up at the darkness above her, the cobwebs tangled in the eaves of a room that can’t truly be called a basement but serves much the same purpose: it is underground, accessible via a single narrow door, and intended for the storage of things that were meant to be forgotten. She has been stored here. She has been stored here for a very long time.

With the understanding that time has passed comes a slowly dawning understanding that her breath is pushing air into her body. She has a body, hers, no one else’s, hers alone, and she commands that body to sit up, to let her get a better look at her surroundings. Her muscles are slow and reluctant to respond to her commands, accustomed as they are to untroubled motionlessness, and the fact that they respond at all would seem like some sort of a miracle if she had more of an understanding of her own limitations.

As she sits up, she becomes aware that she has risen from a shallow pool of warm, brackish liquid, the color of the scum that gathers in the bottom of a fountain. It is green-brown with algae; it smells of yeast and nutrients. It runs down her arms and drips from her hair as she looks around, still not fully understanding what she sees, still not equipped to understand.

The basement that isn’t a basement is lined with shelves, and the shelves are lined with strange equipment, things she doesn’t have names for and can’t identify. Beakers and bottles of inexplicable liquids; jars and packets of strange herbs and powders; boxes of rocks, even—some of them broken down with hammers, others waiting for their turn in the vast mortar and pestle that dominates one of the work tables.

There is a mirror against one wall. The girl sitting in the shallow liquid bath yearns for it as soon as she sees it, yearns for it the way a flower yearns for the sun. She attempts to stand, and her legs, which have never been used for this purpose before, respond to the indignity by dumping her to the floor in an ungainly heap of angles and limbs.

She sprawls there for a moment, struggling to catch her breath, hating the inexplicable force that has done this to her. The idea that perhaps resenting gravity is not the most sensible course of action will take some time to come to her; when it arrives, she will hold fast to her hatred, having nothing else to take its place.

The fall jerks several tubes out of her arms and back, leaving her dripping more than just the brackish liquid on the floor. There is no pain, either from the disconnection or the impact. Pain will come later, when she has a better understanding of her own outline. Many things will come later. In the here and now, she is pushing herself up with hands flattened against the concrete floor, smearing lines of chalk and charcoal that have been sketched there (but not smearing the paint beneath them; they are temporary accents for a much larger, more permanent working, and they were never meant to last through a trauma such as this), pushing herself up and finally to her feet, standing on legs that quiver and shake and threaten to dump her to the floor again.

She does not allow them to. She stands for the first time in her life, and she stands straight and true, and she is a testament to the alchemist’s art. Not all testimonials are positive things. Not all monuments were meant to stand.

Step by shaking step, she makes her way across the room to the mirror, and sees herself for the first time in her life.

She is tall and she is lovely, and only her hair, wet and streaked with green algae as it sticks to her back and shoulders, makes it apparent that her skin has any color to it at all, for her hair is white. Bone-white, bleach-white, white as the driven snow. Her lips seem terribly red against the pallor of her skin, and her eyes are very blue, and she would be beautiful if she weren’t so entirely terrible. She is the ghost of a girl, and not a girl at all.

She is seventeen years old and she has been dead since the day she was born and as she looks at herself in the mirror, she understands two things:

First, that to be alive is a wonderful thing, and something she very much desires. Something she has always very much desired, for all that before this moment she was unaware that she desired anything at all.

Second, that she once had a sister, a girl with whom she shared the waters of the womb, floating in peaceful silence before there was anything else in the world. And somehow that sister was able, through accident of birth or timing or something far more sinister, to break free and walk the world as if she were a real person. As if she somehow had the right to be the one who lived while her sister, her sister, died.

In that moment, the girl in the basement finds the second thing she has to hate. Gravity, and the girl whose name she does not know, the girl she can conceptualize only through her absence.

She doesn’t know where she is, doesn’t know her own name or how she’s intended to get out of this room, but she knows how to stand, and she knows how to hate, and she knows that in this instant, those two things are enough.

She’s going to have a life. Even if she has to take it away from someone else.

She turns a circle, looking at her surroundings, trying to understand the things that make no sense, that she was never meant to know. She’s still turning when there is a click and something she didn’t have the context to recognize until this moment as a door swings open, revealing the young man on the other side.

He looks to be a few years older than she is, tall and gaunt, but tan. He’s seen the sun, this man, this boy, and she hates him for it. Hate is coming more and more easily to her, the only emotion she fully understands at this point in her slow climb toward fully realizing who and what she is, the scape and the scope of herself. She has her edges, she knows that, she has her limits; but she also has a child’s innocent solipsism, the gentlest inability to stop viewing absolutely everything in reference to herself.

It would make her a monster, if she knew what a monster was. Right here and now, she barely even knows what she is, and knows only that she hates.

“Hello,” says the boy. “You must be Aven.”

The name isn’t familiar in the sense of her ever having heard it before, but she knows it all the same, knows it down to the bones of her, because as soon as he speaks it, she understands that he’s correct: she is Aven, and so she must be Aven, must be the person that she is. There’s no other option. She hates him even more for that, for taking the moment when she could have been absolutely anyone and turning her into a specific someone, a person with rules and limitations. She is more concrete now than she was an instant before, and it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all.

“I’m Trevor,” he says, and takes a few more steps toward her, not seeming to realize how much danger he’s in. His hands are empty. She doesn’t know why that should matter, but it does. “I’m your Corn Jenny. It’s a stupid name, I know, but I didn’t pick it. I don’t understand why the other three seasons get to be ‘Jack,’ and I get stuck with the only girl’s name in the bunch, but whatever. I’m going to help you navigate this labyrinth. I’m going to help you win.”