Something In The Way-SYLUS X MC X ZAYNE

IV: "I remember, everything"

              I used to think winter was the kindest season, that slow hush of white on the streets and rooftops and the bent backs of trees, the way snow fell like a soft correction over everything that had gone wrong, how it moved without hurry and turned sharp edges into rounded ones as if the world could practice forgiveness, and in those months the house smelled like warm bread and cinnamon and the wool of my grandmother's sweaters drying by the fire, and I remember Caleb laughing from the floor where he would sit cross-legged with a book he barely pretended to read just so he could stay in the room with us, and Grandmother humming a tune that had no words while her needles clicked, and me tucked in close with a steaming bowl I would cradle as if it were a small sun that belonged only to our hands. I learned early that snowfall could feel like a beginning even when you were standing in the rubble of the old year, that it gave you permission to look forward without apologizing for what you could not fix, and hope came to me then as simply as the steam that rose from a pot, quiet and obvious and natural.

That place does not exist now. The house that wore winter like a halo is a black crater on a neglected street, the fireplace is a broken mouth filled with ash and the smell of old smoke that no rain can wash away, Grandmother is under stone with her hands still and her tune unspooling into a silence that will not answer me back, under stone where the wind cannot find her, and Caleb, for all that he still walks, might as well be buried beside her because the person I loved is gone in a manner that is worse than dying, gone into himself, gone into hunger, gone into the part of the world that wants and wants, and I do not know how to talk to a memory when the body is still walking. Winter is cruel, I see that now, but so is summer with its glare that exposes everything I cannot hide, and spring with its promises that never arrive for me, and autumn with its vanity of colors that always ends in a hard brown end, because the calendar lost its meanings on the day everything burned and the seasons have been a single long hour ever since.

Sometimes when I am not quite awake and not quite asleep I see a pair of eyes suspended in the dark like embers that refuse to die, red and watchful and close enough to lift the hair along my arms, and I do not know if they belong to a nightmare or to someone who has finally found me, and my heart begins an old drum that summons fear and courage in equal parts, and in that suspended place a name rises to the back of my throat before I can decide whether to welcome it or swallow it, he, Sylus, could it be, and the question opens inside me like a door I am not ready to walk through.

The first sound that steadies in the room when I open my eyes is the crackling of a fire that has been burning long enough to grow confident, and the first thing I see are the windows, tall panes with snow pasted in white crescents along their edges, and for a soft foolish instant I let myself believe I am back in the room where life was small and safe, but the lie falls away as sweat pools cold beneath my spine and slicks my hair to my neck and a deep ache lives behind my eyes like a storm that has not yet spent itself. I register the heat and then the sweat, an impossible slickness pooled beneath me as if my body has been running a race while unconscious, damp hair stuck to my neck and a sour tang along my upper lip, and even before I try to move I know motion will betray me because the mattress dips under my weight as if the world has grown a little heavier and decided to test me.

I push my palms against the mattress and the movement lights a sharp line of pain along my ribs, a clean white flare that steals my breath, and the memory that answers the pain comes hard and fast, the Wanderer breaking the forest into a tangle of sound and shadow, Sylus pulling the world's attention like a magnet for danger, my feet choosing to turn back before my mind agreed, a pressure like a fist around my skull, and then the feeling of something in me tearing as if my thoughts were cloth and a hand had grasped both ends and pulled until the weave split.

I touch my temple and feel the damp heat of my skin and the faint throb beneath it, and my fingers come away shaking, and I stare at my hands like they are a message from someone I do not know, pale and trembling and not entirely mine, and when I look around the room my vision doubles for a breath, the cabin's rough timbers and iron stove and wool blankets overlaid with white stone and a gold-sheened ceiling where patterns coil and bloom like living script, as if two rooms are trying to be true at once, as if two universes have leaned too close and begun to bleed into one another through a seam that runs exactly through the center of my skull.