Author: Abigail Betts
“You shouldn’t climb that high.” he watched her place a hesitant foot on a suspiciously thin branch.
“If we don’t get the lights to the top branches, it’s going to look like there are sparkling wine glasses all over their front lawn instead of trees.” She took both hands off the tree trunk to toss the strand of white lights onto a branch over her head.
“That doesn’t sound like such a bad alternative to me.” He looked around at the darkening sky. “The rest can wait until tomorrow, at least. If you’re hell-bent on defying death for the sake of fairy lights, you could do with some help from sunlight.”
“I could do with some help from my spotter.” She smiled impishly down at him. “You know, seeing as you’re the only thing standing between me and my attempts to ‘defy death’.”
He shook his head with a laugh, but took a step closer to the base of the bare bones of the dogwood tree wrapped in her lights. “I’m just saying that this could wait until tomorrow. We could go inside where it’s warm and cozy...”
“That’s not going to work!” she called down in a taunting sing-song voice that was strangely tolerable. “You know I prefer the cold.” She tossed her scarf down at him with a flourish, and it smacked him across the face. “You, however, are free to go into the ‘warm and cozy’. I’m perfectly fine. Heat rises, you know.”
He wrapped the mismatched, knit scarf around his neck. It was made from dozens of different colors, with no apparent pattern to its length, or to the recurrence of the colors. “What’s this scarf supposed to be?”
“Everything,” she said simply.
He grinned into the warm wool and pressed her further. “Your grandmother- who I’m convinced has wandered straight off the set of some Disney film- will undoubtedly have caramel hot chocolate on the stove for you...”
She paused for a moment. “No, she won’t... She made it for us after that unfortunate exchange of friendly fire during the first snow fall yesterday.”
“And I’m fully confident that she’ll have made it again. She’s been watching us from the dining room window, anxiously waiting for the moment she gets to brush snow off your precious shoulders and wrap you in a warm, cozy blanket...”
She shook a branch over his head and showered him in snow. “Come off it, already! I’m nearly finished.”
“It can wait a day.”
The playfulness melted out of her voice. “No, it can’t.”
“We’ve got a whole day-...”
She interrupted him forcefully. “Yes, but I’d rather spend that day inside- in the ‘warm and cozy’- watching movies, playing darts, cards, and all the other silly games with you and everyone else in there,” she took her hands off of the tree to gesture to the picturesque, ginger-bread-house-come-to-life behind them. Icicles clung around windows that were hung with red ribbons and outlined with white fairy lights. Holding onto her legs while she had crawled around the second story windows hanging lights had been equally stressful.
“I’d rather spend the day like that, drinking gallons of caramel hot chocolate.” Her voice broke at the end of her diatribe. “And.... they won’t be able finish decorating out here for Christmas when I leave... it’s too cold for them to be out here.”
He felt the imaginary warm that had surrounded them freeze in the air. “One more day,” he said quietly.
She kept her back to him as she fastened the final strand of lights in their place. “One day.”
“You shouldn’t go outside.”
She considered that with dark amusement. “Shouldn’t I?”
Her laughter hardened the edge of his voice. “It’s below freezing. You’ve got to make your flight in six hours from now. It might make getting through security a little bit difficult if you’re hypothermic. I mean, I would certainly feel clumsier when I’m holding up a line of impatient businessmen because my fingers are too numb to undo my shoelaces, but hey, I guess that’s not really my concern.”
The chiming of the grandfather clock in the foyer made them both jump. Neither of them enjoyed looking frightened at the moment. “How the hell do they sleep through that?” she hissed. Everything around them looked like it was glowing with a horrible blue light. As she gazed out at the growing cover of powder in the back yard, the falling flakes cast eerie shadows into the dark kitchen as they passed over the porch light. The snowflakes threw shadows all around them that seemed to make the dark waves of her hair ripple like water.
After a heavy pause, her voice startled him again. “You don’t have to come outside with me.”
“No, I really don’t.” the acid in his voice was uncontrollable. The night just felt too heavy for peace. He felt the constant need to look over his shoulder. In the kitchen of a house full of people in the dead of night, it was only a matter of time... even if the living room was their “bedroom.” He muttered to himself, “I really shouldn’t be here at all, I suppose... but where else should I be?” He spoke to her back. “Should I not be here?”
He was met with silence. In his periphery, an array of knives caught the eerie winter light like icicles. White bones retracted like claws into his palms. “Six more hours... You should get some rest. It’s a long trip.”
“It’s not that long. It will only be about a day spent traveling, including the train. It was worse when I had to drive out to Whangarei after I landed in Auckland.”
“Beg pardon?” he asked through a sigh.
“New Zealand.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. There was never a prologue to her presentation of information, large or small. “New Zealand?”
She shrugged and turned on her heel toward the kitchen sink. She rifled around in a cabinet, and produced a bottle of dish soap. She poured a generous measure into a bowl, and then added a trickle of water from the faucet.
“What are you doing?” he watched her pull open drawer after unfamiliar drawer full of cookie cutters, stationery, and fossilized strawberry candies.
“I’m going outside.” Her voice cracked, and he turned his face to hide the mask of anger that suddenly and violently pulled at his features. He left her to her crazed search for a moment, and searched around their nest of bed sheets. He came back with his leather jacket, taken from the armchair next to the fold out couch. It felt like a particularly wretched armchair at the moment. It was her grandmother’s, and it was upholstered in a faded denim hue that seemed to dissolve in the air around them. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to keep away from “bed” tonight. He didn’t want to have to sleep there, either.
“Damn it all.” Her voice rang out in the peace-less midnight. She was looking down at a small funnel with contempt. She plunged the funnel into her bowl, swirled it around, and then seemed satisfied. As she blew past him toward the back porch, he tossed the jacket around her shoulders. She froze in motion, and sloshed some of her mixture onto the floor in surprise. She stared down at the puddle on the dark tile floor for a moment. “It looks like ice,” she said in a small voice, as she continued onto the back porch.
When he looked down at the glowing blue mess, he saw a rainbow caught in the light on its surface. It looked like the suspension of oil on top of water, though this was much cleaner, and wouldn’t result in the demise of pathetically sympathetic ducklings. It would have been nice to be suspended in simple distractions like that for a while.
He stood in the doorway, perched between the warm, cozy carpet of the living room and the unforgiving stone walkway outside. She stood on the edge of the stone pathway. “Come back inside.” His facial muscles were clenching in response to the chill seeping into his marrow. “Come on-...”
“It’s so pretty out here. I wish I’d taken more pictures during the day. Look at the sundial over there. You can just see the gnomon through the cap of snow,” she giggled in a burst of steam. “It looks like the tin man’s face is buried under a snow bank...
“What the hell’s a gnomon?” he asked while he tried to avoid getting his tongue caught between his teeth.
“It would be the tin man’s nose.” She continued on. “And the birds... We never see cardinals back home. I’ve loved watching them in the morning over coffee. I suppose you’re used to them. Then again, you drink tea. But when they’re out the snow’s fresh, smooth and so...clean. Then they fly around and stir it up like blood spatters on skin...”
“Hey-...”
She kept going, unfazed. “It’s so violently pretty here. It’s the kind of pretty that hurts, don’t you think? I’m really going to miss that.” She looked at him and flashed a painful smile. “And I’m going to miss midnight dart competitions in the basement. Consequentially, I’ll miss the madness of doing shots while trying to throw sharp metal objects at a very small target.... Why did we do that?” she stared down at her bowl with a suspended grin.
He couldn’t quite meet her gaze as he said, “I’ll miss the street market in Youngstown.” Her eyes were frozen on the bowl, and his eyes were frozen on her bare feet. “It was the first day.” In his memory, he saw swirling patterns of blue and white that blended into the reality of the world around them in royal colors. “You lent me your scarf, and called me a baby for getting cold. We walked around the stalls, and you were shaking. You had goose-bumps on your arms, so you walked around with your arms crossed... so I wouldn’t see.”
She let out a derisive snort. “I wasn’t cold. You’re worse than Home Depot.”
“What?” He pinched the bridge of his nose at the arrival of yet another abrupt shift in her tone and conversation. “If you just wanted to run circles around my head with- admittedly entertaining, nonsensical ramblings, that’s fine. But we could at least do it inside, under blankets, with thick wool socks on!”
She ignored him and twisted her arm away from the hand he’d reached toward her. “You know, I can cut anything out of a band saw, and I can cut the same shape out using a reciprocating saw and manage perfectly smooth edges. I love the smell of wood, dust, and metal, and I don’t mind getting dirty. But when I went in the Home Depot here, those ass-hats in their horrid orange vests followed me around the store with, ‘What are you looking for, miss?’, ‘Do you need some help, honey?’, or ‘The garden center is that way.’ It’s bullshit, and I really don’t care to take it from you, too.”
He hazarded a guess. “I’m not trying to condescend to you-...”
“No, you’re not. But I’m trying to distract you!” her anger seemed to crack in the air. She held his eyes with a sharp heat, but her lips were trembling.
“Your feet-...”
“My, how orange you’ve gotten!” she trilled manically as she swirled a finger in her bowl and splashed at him with choreographed nonchalance.
“Just admit that you’re cold!” His shout came out in a visceral cloud of heat.
She cocked her head to the side and said simply, “It looks like you’re smoking. Do you suppose that if you love a smoker, you could literally become addicted to a person? Second hand smoke has been proven to be just as dangerous as smoking first hand, so it makes sense that second hand smoke could be just as addictive as smoking first hand. Sure, the addiction isn’t actually bound to a person’s essence, presence, or whatever… But the brain would form the association that the gratification for its addiction comes from the person who smoked. So, your body would chemically crave someone. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not just waxing poetic here, it’s a scientific fact that-…”
“You’re cold!” He screamed over her smoky words.
He felt a painful chill as she abruptly lay down in the snow. His jacket was abandoned on the stone pathway. She placed the bowl on her chest, and dunked the broad end of the funnel in the liquid. “Don’t worry, I’ll be quick. Everything will freeze over in the bowl within minutes out here anyway, and clearly, you’re terribly chilly.” She held the tapered end of the funnel to her pale lips, and carefully blew a large bubble. Rainbows bounced off its surface from the harsh light overhead. She balanced the bubble for a moment on the funnel’s rim, watching it with a detached focus. Her features were harshly drained of color.
“It froze,” she finally said with a weak smile.
She met his eyes, and all the blue in the world began to waver. He walked over the slick stones on bare feet and pulled her out of the snow. After retrieving his jacket, he ushered her back inside while she held the funnel in shaking hands. She clumsily sat down on the thick carpet the moment they were inside, and he forcefully shut the door behind them. The snow was already melting in her hair, and lank strands clung around her face.
She held a finger to her little orb, and pulled it off in a complete, solid piece. Blue eyes peered up at him from underneath wet lashes. “Watch.” She burst the delicately frozen bubble between her fingers, and it fell apart- not into shards, but into ethereal, disconnected wisps of gray.
“It looks like burned paper.” He said quietly.
“Strange, isn’t it?” her smile was gone, but her color was coming back in hectic roses.
“Why did you want to do that?” he asked quietly.
Her eyes drifted toward the makeshift nest of furniture covered in bed sheets in the living room. “Six more hours....” when she looked at him, all the stubborn, frustrating madness had faded away. He glanced at her bowl of dish soap, and saw a thin, cracked film of ice on its colorful surface. The clock started screaming again. She cursed through gritted teeth and moaned, “What else are we going to do if we aren’t going to sleep?”