It’s Snowing

Teagan Posey

Content warning: depressive tendencies, sickness

Little white flecks litter the withering grass in your lawn. A creeping temperature bleeds through your colonial window and makes you shiver under a pile of covers. You want to flip through something on your phone, but you can’t even open your eyes, much less move your arm around to find it. There’s a building pressure in your skull. It’s too heavy, even as it lies on the pillow beneath it. You hope that you move in your sleep to a more comfortable position; heaven knows you can’t fix it now.

Your mattress is soaked in tears and sweat. Your hair, once soft and down to your thighs, is one giant mat behind your head. It’s been two weeks since it was combed. It’s been a month since you took a real shower, settling for the occasional rag wash instead. The last time someone came into your room, they started gagging. You would too if you had the energy.

They still haunt your dreams, giggling from across a picnic table. They’re the only person who ever laughed at your stupid jokes. You’d been losing them slowly, saw it coming from a mile away, but you hoped and prayed and begged that you were wrong. You weren’t. You never are with these things. The world’s worst gift, all for your taking.

It hurts to think. Takes too much effort. A ghost of a memory glances against the side of your subconscious. It feels like summer, too hot, burning through whatever tender flesh your mind has built up to block the outside world from reaching inside. It leaves a cavern. Thousands of different voices charge through the breach, screaming all around you. You can’t make out any of the words, but you know that they all say the same thing, one way or another. You grit your teeth. Maybe they’re right.

Someone calls from the kitchen. Whose voice is that again? You can’t make it out through the fog. Maybe it was your mother. If so, you better listen. You tell yourself to sit up. It doesn’t work. You try again, afraid of the voice as it grows louder. Why is it yelling? You can’t remember what you did wrong.

You tumble out of bed. It’s the first time you’ve put weight on your feet today, evident in the way you crash into your opposite wall before you can catch yourself. You didn’t intend it, but the pain helps clear your head, and you make your way down the stairs.

She beckons you out your back door with a smile on her face. It’s snowing. You don’t understand what she’s saying. You take two steps out into the world. It’s too bright, wind harsh and cold in the winter sun. It’s snowing, it’s snowing. Your body shudders, and you feel your feet getting damp as water soaks through your fuzzy socks. It’s snowing. It’s snowing. It’s snowing. A little white fleck flitters down from the sky, stinging the tip of your nose. You wrinkle it in annoyance. Why is it so cold? Why are your feet so wet? It’ssnowingit’ssno wingit’ssnowingit’ssnowing.

It’s snowing.

You fall to your knees in the white fluff, chest puffed up into the sky. You twitch and whine with the tremors that rake across your body, sending nausea from your forehead to your toes. Collapsed forwards into a lump, you feel bile rising up against your will. It tastes like all the Nothing that you’ve been eating. It pushes and pushes, coming out as a sob, yet it tears up your lungs and throat all the same. Everything stings like winter. Everything burns like summer. It’s been so long since you last felt spring.

You flip over on your back, staring up at the sky as you try to catch your breath. It’s snowing, isn’t it? What a beautiful day.

Vivian Dong

The air leaves our fingers sticky and sweet and blades of thin grass cut our legs like a million little knives, leaving green bloodstains on the backs of our thighs. The sky is candy melting over our heads, dripping pink and orange syrup like glazed sugar over the dying sun. Somewhere in the distance, a car starts, and a voice calls your name, but we ignore it because over the years we’ve mastered the art of avoidance. Instead, we sit in silence and listen to the sound of our heartbeats against the stillness, timing the inhale and exhale of our breath until it all whistles out as one. It's probably my most favorite thing about you, you know, that we can sit like this, in this silence. When I'm with you, I don't need to talk. You always know, and I never have to say a word.

We grew up together, you and I. You know me like only a twin would know her sister, like a body staring at a mirror. I don’t have to tell you I’m scared, scared of that car that is starting and the voice that is calling your name. Scared of the plane I’ll catch tomorrow and the person I’ll be if I return. We never say anything. we always know. But in case this is it, in case you don’t, here it is, before we go: when we are nothing but sagging skin and fragile bone, when the world collapses and we are all taking our last breath, you will still be the first person I call. If today is our last day together, or if we see each other again and again and again, you need to know you’ll always have me. In a thousand years, when time has turned us into collections of crinkled memories, when I forget my keys, my glasses, myself, I’ll remember you. One day, when I look back on these years, I’ll remember them with a smile. I have you to thank for that. So here it is, my ode to you, before we go.

one day bily went to the grocery store.

Animals Playing Instruments

Jewel Wallace Pen

Deirdre Cunniffe

When things reach their threshold, like roses without blooms, using my ribcage like a lattice. When my chest is a vice until it falls apart, when everything is loud and too quiet to hear. When everything becomes too much, I cross state lines.

It’s a strange coping mechanism, even stranger to some who grew up in the center of wide open states that encompass plains, or those who didn’t grow up in the states at all. I am a child of the east coast, tied to the Atlantic like a ‘forget-me-not’ ribbon. Born in New York and bouncing from state to state, eventually landing in Pennsylvania, right outside of Philadelphia, right on the edges of one of the larger states I’ve lived in. I’ve always lived on edges. The edges of cities, the edges of states, the edges of continents when the land meets the ocean. It’s what brought me to my particular method of escapism. I’m about an hour’s drive from New Jersey, a little further north to New York, and a bit longer in the opposite direction to DC, Maryland, or Virginia.

When my body is tense and I feel like I want to scream and cry and curse, but can’t seem to do anything at all, I get in the car and do what I know I can. I drive.

It’s a semblance of control, I think. When everything seems to spiral, when I feel like I can’t control anything, not even my own feelings, I turn to the things I can control: the GPS, the exits I take, the aux, the volume. The speedometer and where I stop for gas and how far I go and when I come back. I don’t drive to cities and dream of when I’ll be able to move closer to their centers, to be further from outskirts and edges. Instead, I drive to those edges. It’s a reassuring thing, getting lost. I’m getting lost of my own accord. There is no fear in simply going, only fear of not being able to return from where you came. That is, only if you want to return. And in the moments when I leave, I am never so focused on coming back to what I’m running from.

I’ve never liked spring. There’s far too much change going on. It’s not surprising that my wildest excursion to date was an oddly warm day in early February. Normally, I never go too far. This time was different.

I drove for 8 straight hours. 4 there, 4 back. It took a tank and a half of gas, and looking back I feel bad about the environmental impact of my own mind. I drove across Pennsylvania and into Ohio.

I have no idea why I chose Ohio. There is nothing in Ohio that’s particularly enticing to me. Or anyone for that matter. Nothing against the residents of Ohio, but I cannot name anything interesting about your state. Not even the name is interesting. Oh-hi-oh. Boring. But that day in February, I crossed your state line, only to cross it again moments afterword, returning home, feeling much, much better. I did feel “Welcome to Ohio,””, just like your sign had said. I felt genuinely wanted in the fields of nothing that stretched out in front of me. Sometimes that’s all it takes.