Gifted

II --The Cold

Dusty light streamed in from the warped, yellowed glass window. My eyelids were glued together with sleep and I rubbed them with clumsy, numb fingers. The air was morbidly cold, and I shivered violently despite my blankets. Finally prying my eyes open, I blinked and wiggled my dazed extremities. I exhaled and realized I could see my breath. I shuddered again.

        Rolling off the straw mattress, I went to my drawer to scrounge for leggings and a top, making sure to grab wool legwarmers. Curious about the peculiar temperature, I pulled on the articles and hobbled to the glass. I rubbed my arms furiously to try to create some heat and leaned my forehead to the freezing glass and gazed out.

        I don't know what I expected -- frost before harvest? Ice crystals growing on the window and fluffy flakes floating from the heavens would've been absurd. Impossible for the late summer weather. Still, my stomach dropped and a hard lump formed in my throat. I couldn't swallow. I couldn't breathe. It was coming.

        But still, I refused to accept it. Just like the previous day, the charm laid heavily under my shirt, prominent against my chest. I was aware of the thin chain chafing against my skin, catching on the baby hairs at the nape of my neck.

        Breaths stalled in my throat as I pulled the chain from the side to get the ornament into my view. The little hourglass was even colder against my palm. It was wrought out of shining gold, turned dull by years of exposure to air and grime. The fine, dark sand was an ominous black: a promise of what was to come.

        I wasn't ready to die.

        Yet I couldn't tear my eyes off the pendent. I was captured, hypnotized, by the rapidly draining particles. The grains trickled through the minuscule opening separating the two chambers; I was staring Death in the face. The top chamber held only an eighth of the sand left -- a healthy person my age should only have lost an eighth. A healthy person loses maybe a single grain every other day, at most. A healthy person's hourglass should still be infantile. What refused me the title of a healthy person?

        I collapsed down onto my bed again and buried my face in my palms. I knew the sand always ran out faster the closer you were to death, but I'd brushed off the slow acceleration as a warning of an illness. I'd always expected it to slow back to normal, or at least to level out. But each time I looked at the glistening powder, I was painfully aware that I was literally watching my life drain before my eyes. Yet another uncontrollable bout of shivering interrupted my thoughts.. The shudders wracked my small frame, and I burrowed back down into my covers, clothes and all.

        Why me? I thought. I screamed it into the vast nothingness created by the blankets; the idea is quickly swallowed by the darkness. The rough fibers of the throw were comforting as I rubbed it obsessively between my thumb and forefinger. And just for a moment, I stopped. Here, alone in my own little world, I, for the first time in my life, felt truly safe. The aching pains of hunger could no longer gnaw at my stomach lining, the threat of bears and wolves stalking me as I hunted. For a moment, I was calm. The impenetrable obscurity of the fabric temporarily shielded me from life -- or at least, what I had left. My heart rate slowed, and my breathing evened. Maybe death wasn't such a horrible thing.

        But at the thought of my family, my safe haven shattered around me, shards of my short-lived fantasy crushing, burying, and devouring me in its wake. Again, I couldn't breathe, suffocated by the hopelessness that crashed down around my shoulders and weighted on my consciousness. I was plunged back into despair and was acutely aware of my soon-to-be rendezvous with Death. How would Mother and Lily get on? I thought of my sister's delicate body, her innocent eyes dulled by the animal need for food. Night and I hunted as a team, we had a system. Without one of us it would collapse and the family would starve and --