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brITT

The world passed in a strange dream.

Heat, then cold, breathed icy winter down her skin. It crackled all the way into her fingers and toes with shivery exhales. She sought warmth inside. Deep in her gut, her soul. None arrived. The glacial flow bathed her, and she shivered. The reopened wounds provided a painful anchor outside the hellish, freezing death. She could not succumb while everything throbbed with such totality.

Her own blood burned, burned, burned.

Twisting. Gutting. Wrenching.

The torrential cold returned.

Too frozen.

Much, much too frozen.

Tremors sprinted up and down her torso. They shook the small bones in her fingers, her wrists. She felt like a bag of bones, wielded in an ancient ceremony. Her teeth clacked. Blood and warmth leached from her skin. Another plunge into arctic waters. Too weak to protest, she endured. There was no fighting against this.

Except . . . something appeared.

What were those graying apparitions?

The hair on the back of her neck stood on edge as her body jostled. Her distant voice wanted to cry out in pain, but she couldn’t. Nothing existed in her throat. No external manifestation of the thickening interior. Arms clutched her. Her body elevated, shifting. The muscles protested.

All became a blur.

Deeper, the cold fever sprouted. Like roots, seeking the hidden recesses and darkness, where the pain didn’t exist.

Deeper.

Darker.

Deeper.

The venom dissipated. Something else beckoned. A quiet place, where the jostling didn’t hurt. A quiet place, where still waters lay like dappled pewter. A quiet place, with no disturbing waves. A quiet place without the whisper of sound.

Deeper.

Into the quiet place, she sank.