Page 8 of Seasonal Fears

“Oh, then, I’ve never been in a bucket before,” said Zib, and pulled herself up onto the well’s edge before reaching for Niamh. The drowned girl took her hands and tugged her gently forward, and Zib tumbled into the bucket, finding herself seated quite securely on the lip, with her bare feet against the cool wood of the bottom.

It was quite the most comfortable seat she’d had in hours, and so she turned a sunshine smile on Avery, and said, “Come on, Avery. We’ll all fit in this bucket if we try, and it feels so nice.”

Avery, who had noticed the Crow Girl’s failure to return from the bottom of the well, and who had a slightly more developed sense of narrative structure than Zib did, having always been rather more interested in staying in his room to read, bit his lip and looked at the bucket. “If I get in the bucket, will the rope break and drop us all to the bottom of the well?”

“No,” said Niamh. “I promise, the rope won’t break.” …

—From Along the Saltwise Sea, by A. Deborah Baker

Heartbeat

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

Because Melanie dies so fast, she doesn’t see the way the others abandon her body as soon as Harry hits the ground, and she wouldn’t blame them if she did. She’s been waiting for this moment her whole life, and while she would be furious to know the decision had been taken away from her—while she would be appalled and disbelieving if someone tried to tell her she was dead because a woman named Diana had finally managed to shrug off the alchemical chains keeping her in a state of enchanted sleep, crawl out of her grave, and orchestrate her own demise—she would be more horrified to know anyone had bothered with her when Harry needed them.

She’s the one who’s here to go, not him. He’s here to be the hero of the story, the man with the tragically dead girlfriend in his past, not another body on the field.

But here and now, that’s exactly what he is.

One of the other players, a junior named Trevor who’ll probably be one of the starters next season (he came to practice late and distracted, which he’s never done before), drops to his knees and presses his ear to Harry’s chest. He took first aid and got his certification last summer, as part of working at the local pool. He took his job as a lifeguard very seriously, and that’s why no one says anything as they watch him work, despite the fact that Trevor’s dislike of Harry is well-established enough to be something of a joke around the school. He was one of the unlucky boys who trailed after Mel in middle school, punch-drunk on his crush for her, what adults called “puppy love” and laughed away, as if the feelings of children don’t matter, as if they never have the heft to hurt. When Mel didn’t even notice his clumsy attempts at courting her, leaving Harry to make his preexisting claim clear … well, that had been bad enough.

But when Trevor had tried to tell Melanie she was dating a caveman who treated her like something that could be owned, she had laughed at him and said Harry wasn’t being overly possessive, just exactly as possessive as she was. He was only doing what she wanted him to do. Trevor has barely spoken to either one of them since then, never even looked at Melanie twice in the halls, was the only person not to sign any of her get-well-soon cards when she went to the hospital earlier this year.

He’s also the only one here who knows CPR. So the crowd doesn’t object to what he’s doing, just stands by silently, halfway holding their own breath as they wait for him to say anything.

Finally, Trevor sits up and says, “He’s alive. He has a heartbeat. Has anyone called 911?”

No one has. Everything happened too fast, and the only person holding a phone is Christine, who has been far too focused on her potential career as an independent news consultant to think about contacting the authorities.

“My phone’s in my bag,” says another of the cheerleaders, and they scatter, glad to finally have something to do.

No one bothers checking Melanie’s pulse. There’s no need. She fell with her eyes open, and she’s still staring up into the clouded sky, unblinking, motionless in a way nothing alive can sustain. She’s gone, and they know she’s gone, they don’t need the proof that comes from laying hands on a corpse and calling it rationality.

So when she blinks, no one sees. No one sees her take her first, shallow breath, chest barely rising. The pain is still with her, a vast and incomprehensible presence that seems large enough to blot out the entire world, but she’s lived with pain before. She’s been in pain almost from the moment she was born, almost from the first breath she took. This breath feels like that one, the two of them joined in an ineffable, undefinable way that nonetheless defines absolutely everything. If she could understand the connection between them, she would understand absolutely everything. It feels like being born again.

Despite the pain that blankets the world, for the first time she can remember, the first time (ever) in years, her chest doesn’t hurt. She’s used to living life intimately aware of her own heartbeat, listening for any fluctuation with the focused intensity of a guard on permanent watch, but right now, she can’t hear anything. All that comes from the cage beneath her ribs is silence. Her bones don’t shake with mistimed beats. She feels … fine.

Melanie blinks at the sky, taking slow stock of herself. The pain is everywhere and all-consuming, but after that initial wave, no worse than what she’s been living with for her entire life. She can push it aside and ignore it. She’s on the ground, that much is obvious: the grass beneath her is wet and cold, and the dew is soaking into the polyester fabric of her uniform, making it stick to her skin. She can tell she’s cold, but it doesn’t bother her in the slightest: she doesn’t shiver or try to roll away from it.

That’s not as unusual as it might seem. She’s always had a remarkable tolerance for cold, pronounced enough that her father used to find her outside in the snow in her bare feet, catching snowflakes in her hands and studying them intently. They never melted when she was a child. She remembers that vividly. They didn’t start melting until she reached puberty, and her heart broke a little that winter, when she realized the snow melted when it touched her skin. She’d heard about unicorns only coming for virgins (patriarchal bullshit, as if a horse that was also a phallic symbol would give a damn about virginity), but she’d never heard about snow refusing to melt for girls who had yet to grow their first pubic hair.

Absence of a heartbeat: strange. Absence of frostbite: pleasant and not all that unusual. If she were just a little younger, or if her hair were any color other than absolute black, the other children would probably have called her “Elsa” instead of “Snow White” when they were still innocently cruel enough to taunt the girl with the fatal heart condition. Absence of Harry: unthinkable.

He should have been there the second her vision cleared, kneeling over her, trying to shake her awake. It’s happened before when she collapsed in his presence, and while she hates to worry him, there’s also something sweetly reassuring about knowing he’ll be there when she wakes up. Slowly, she pushes herself up onto her elbows, blinking at the crowd of people, football players and cheerleaders alike, that’s formed around something on the ground a few yards away.

Christine turns toward the movement as Melanie rises, phone still out and recording in her hand, and screams.

The sound is an ice pick driven through the heart of the world. Melanie hears a story in the sound, a tale of shock and collapse and impossible inevitability. She scrambles to her feet, heels skidding in the mud, and her body answers easily, leaving what feels like the bulk of the pain behind her on the ground. By the time she’s standing, only her head and her rump hurt, and since both those probably hit hard when she fell, it makes sense. She’s still feeling the impact. She’s not hurting from anything else.

“Harry?” she demands. Christine, still screaming, doesn’t answer. Melanie tries again, louder, almost in a shout, “Harry?!”

The crowd begins to part, leaving her with a clear line of sight to the boy on the ground. He isn’t moving. Her heart, her traitorous heart, doesn’t leap in her chest or skip a beat—it is, for once, following the rules everyone else seems to live by and simply beating calmly away, so distant and ordinary that she can’t even feel it—but it feels like it’s breaking all the same, because she doesn’t have to see his face.

She knows him. Knows every inch of him, every line and every angle, knows it with an artist’s eye, with the eye of the little girl who could stare for hours at snowflakes when she wanted to truly understand them. “Harry!” she gasps, and bolts for him, moving faster and more easily than she has in months, since the last time she came home from the hospital, since her doctor stopped looking her in the eye when he answered her carefully worded questions.

The crowd makes space for her. She’s not sure she would have been able to forgive them if they hadn’t, if she’d been forced to lay hands on a single one of them. She scrambles her way to Harry’s side and hits the grass on hands and knees. He’s still. He’s so still, and this isn’t him, this isn’t her Harry, he’s not the still one, he’s never, ever been the still one. He moves because motion is his natural state of being, as natural to him as stillness sometimes seems to her. But he’s not asleep, he’s not breathing, he’s not here.

The understanding of what that means hits her like a physical blow, like a thing she’s been braced for all her life, and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. Hurts like the wave that slammed down on her before, hurts like the first time she felt her heart stop beating.