Frozen Memories Everyone rushes to the edge of the frozen lake as the first screams ring through the air. The father stays by the hole, not feeling the frost sting his knees with the cold. His heart wrenching shouts of “Eliza” leave him gasping for breath. When she still does not come up and yet another bubble reaches the surface, he takes off his gloves and reaches into the icy depths. The father’s best friend since childhood, the surrogate uncle, places heavy hands on his shoulders, and uses brute force to stop the father from jumping in himself: “It’s too late, she’s been under for too long now. We lost her.” A mother, worried for her own little boy’s safety and lost in a haze of memories of a time long ago, sees the activity in the middle of the lake. She hurries to take off their skates before rushing back to the car to get home, to get to safety. She deflects her son’s questions, not knowing how to explain that a child just drowned in the lake they were just ice skating on. Instead of pedestrians, billboards, and streetlights, she sees the doctor telling her the baby didn’t survive, that it was stillborn. If her daughter had lived, she would have been nine years old, ten in February. She faintly registers her son’s shouts of “Mommy, watch out,” but it’s enough, and she is able to see what’s real, what’s happening right in front of her eyes again and slams on the brakes just in time. The elderly man, startled with the screech of the brakes, clutches at his chest, barely able to make it to the other side of the street. He remembers that sense of helplessness, of not being able to predict what would happen next, he knows it well. He remembers being held prisoner during the war, the beatings when they decided to have some fun, the pain and the relief of blacking out to escape their jeering faces and taunting words. He remembers the trembling fear and vulnerability that encapsulated him every time the sirens sounded overhead or the guards blew out the candles for the night. He sits down at the bus stop, unable to go further, and wraps his coat around himself to fight off the sudden chill. He doesn’t want to remember, but he has learned that sometimes he needs to let down his inner walls in order to get better. The teenaged girl watches the old man sit down, and thinks of her grandpa at the retirement home down the street. She had just gone to visit him, and all he did was stare blankly at the wall. She tried snapping him out of it by waving her hands in front of his face and talking to him, but it was no use. He had been in there for two years now, and he always would talk to her, but something changed today. She remembers him taking her ice-skating in the winter and fishing in the summer, believing that the outdoors were more important than anything done inside the house. One time he even helped her spot a fish under the ice of her backyard pond. She realizes that’s never going to happen again, though. Now, they’re only memories. Sage Malecki ’14 28 Pillars of Salt
Samantha Rosenwald
