Cold

Chapter 1

What you will hear from me, you will not expect. I am not a stereotype. I am not one to fit into the normal clichés. I am not one of good. I am not one of evil. Only one thing reigns true, my name is Daniel. This is my story.

It was summer, almost 3 years ago, the start of my final year before I left home to pursue my dream of being a herbologist at Washington State. I was so close to escaping the unbearable Georgia summers that suffocated you with humidity and took down entire towns in hurricanes. So close to a larger than 2,000 person town that didn't hide itself in tradition and unchartered forests. I was almost gone from the over controlling great aunt who wouldn't let me stay out past 10 and questioned any girl I had ever mentioned as my friend. Life was already hard enough.

My parents were the town recluses, hiding in the Flynt Memorial Library, named after our ancestor, a deserter, in the Civil War who had saved one of the last pigs of the mayor from choking. Both of my parents studied folklore of history, fascinated by the obscurity and bewilderment of it all. And, as any po-dunk, southern town, they were seen as crazies for reading textbooks more often than the Bible. Many avoided us in the market, turning in crammed isles at the sight of us. Some would even take different routes to church to avoid making eye contact while passing by.

I was nothing like my parents. I went to church and I read the Bible as often as possible to try and prove myself to my worthless town. I went to football games, tried out for the basketball team, got involved in debate club. It was never enough, though. I was the one many laughed at for wearing glasses that were thick enough to be bullet proof and wearing the same clothes for 3 years because my parents didn't have decent jobs. I was the school loser.

Then came the accident. Death, even to those many dislike, can scar such a small town as Blossom, Georgia. A red Corolla reported to have been blind sided by a semi truck on highway 34, flown off a bridge, both of the passengers drowning before being rescued from the car.

Where was their son? The boy who worked so hard to fit in, to stay as far away from his family's image as possible? He was at the football game, drunk and stumbling, waiting for his parents to pick him up. But they never came. I never got to say goodbye. Never got to apologize for acting like a prisoner attempting to escape their love. I always thought they were the abominations, the outcasts, but I was. I was the boy who didn't kiss his mama back. I was the boy who never played baseball with my father in the backyard with a broken branch and old dish towels for bases.

It was all of my fault. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,...

I see their faces, bloodied and bruised, their skin tore across. My mother's day dress dripped around her bare ankles and puddled around her sandals. Her skin was grey and ghost like. She held my fathers hand. The side of his face, half concave from being in the main path of the collision. He opened his mouth to speak but it puddled and gurgled and the only thing to escape was a gasp. They both reached for me, pulling against an imaginary force. The air suddenly sucked from my lungs. The water rose up in my throat, my hand grasping at my neck. No air, no sound, no nothing. Just me and the water. Pooling, sucking me further. I fell, my parents watching as I fell, drowning into darkness.

I sat up, gripping at my sheets. My hair was stuck to the cold sweat on my forehead and my shirt clung to my back. It was so irritably cold.

I got up, my feet leaving a trail of heat on the cold linoleum, as I went to the thermometer and turned the temperature up to 75. The registers began to vibrate and the house was alive to the sound of the heating system.

"Daniel James, don't you dare be turning that heat up! You know I can't afford such a big heating bill! It's summer in damn Georgia, just go outside!" A voice called from down stairs, whiny and billowing against my hollow walls.