Holding My Breath [Wattys 2016]

7 2 ~ A n n a

                

Flashback ~ December 30, 2010

People say that home is where the heart is. Well, if that's the case, then I'm homeless now. I don't know where my heart lies anymore. I don't even know where to start looking for it.

It takes me a few minutes to pick myself up after a fit of coughing. My throat feels like it's burning, like someone shoved a hot coal down my throat.

Drowning in frozen water... It makes it harder to breathe even hours later. It makes it feel like your lungs have collapsed inside you. It makes you feel like falling asleep and not waking back up.

I'm not really sure what to do next. I can't think of anything other than Caesar and the photo and the cops. The cops are going to blame me, aren't they. They're not going to stop and think about how I was in the car when it went down. They're not going to stop and think about how I was a victim, too. They'll focus on the fact that I survived and they didn't. They'll focus on the fact that I was a suspect for a case before any of this happened.

I'm walking along the road, sliding every now and then when I lose my balance. It makes me wonder about the cars. Accidents must be very common when the ice is this dangerous, so maybe that's why Caesar chose that to kill my family.

Kill.

I'm not sure they're dead yet. Maybe, by some miracle, somebody got down in time to save my parents. Maybe someone got to them and managed to get the door open. Maybe they got out.

And Toby... Maybe someone pulled him out, too. Maybe they are somewhere out there freaking out about me missing. Maybe I'm the one who is dead.

For some reason, I hope that's true.

After walking for a good twenty minutes, I see a light in the distance. I measure my steps as I walk across the road, trying not to fall. If I fall, I'm road kill. This is a highway, after all. Nobody stops when they see a dead deer lying in the road. Even if it was a person, even if it was me, it would be too dark to tell the difference.

It's not my neighborhood. I'm heading in the wrong direction. I recognize this place-- I went to a party here once. This neighborhood is cut into squares, calculated pieces of land, with farms and stables and even fields of just animals and nothing else. I've been here before, and I know it's on the wrong side of the bridge.

I don't dare go back into the woods, so instead I turn around, forcing my frozen feet to keep walking. Then I stop. I can't keep going like this if I want to keep all of my toes. I need to think for a minute. I need to just block out all of the things racing through my mind for just one minute so I can think.

I turn back to the neighborhood, walking towards it carefully. I can't feel anything anymore.

God, I want to throw up. Is this even real? Am I just going to wake up and find that this was all a dream? That's what happens in a lot of books, right? So why can't that be what's happening to me?

Maybe it is. And even if it isn't, I'm going to pretend that this is a dream. It makes it easier. This is just a dream and none of this is actually real. Just a really, really bad nightmare. So it doesn't matter if I trespass onto someone's land in the middle of the night. It doesn't matter if I go into one of their barns to try and stay warm.

And that's what I do. I run quickly through the snow after hopping the fence to a piece of property that I know has horses. If there are horses, then there has to be a barn. And maybe that will help me somehow. There is no way that I'm going to break into someone's house, but I can get into a barn. There won't be anyone in there in the middle of the night, waiting for me with a shotgun.

I see a dark shape a good hundred or so feet away from me and dart towards it. I don't think about how I can't feel my feet or my face or my hands. I don't think about how my jacket and pants are soaked with muddy slush that is slowly freezing back on me again.

I just keep my eyes on the wooden structure ahead of me and run towards it. Like I had with Caesar when he went to rob that store. He hadn't seen me until I was already inside, but I watched his dark outline against the snow as I ran. That's what I'm doing now. I watch the barn and hope that I can get to it before something else gets to me.