imagine winter

feature film in development.

Pressure. 

On my eyelids, crushing my eyes back into my skull. Water rushes past my ears, into my brain—pressure. Pressure on my curved, naked spine, the space between my fleshy vertebrae exposed, and my neck, sore, holding my head between my knees. My hands slide through the thick, gummy liquid and press against curved walls. I strain my arm back, back, and my knuckles brush against a pebbled, cratered surface. In the silent stillness, each caress is electric. Static runs through my veins, pours from my eyes. 

I push.

*

I blink. 

The room is blurred and blinding. I squint, then, and I gape at the piece of hard shell beneath me, cupping a clear, viscous liquid up against my bare legs and body. It rocks me, gently, as I sit between two roughly split halves of a strangely oblong, hollow creation—an egg, I think. My wet scalp bristles in the frigid air while translucent hair sticks in clumps to my bony shoulder. Gingerly, with my fingertips, I hold it away from my eyes. My entire world—this tiled, fluorescent void—grows distinct.

The largest fragments of the egg are still swinging, slightly. Wet pieces of membrane stick to my calves, and I peel it off. Restless, I start shucking the gelatinous wetness off my limbs. It doesn’t strike me to try to stand on two feet until I see her. 

She stands in the corner, enveloped partially in a rectangular darkness. Her eyes are wide and framed in beautiful red lashes. A dark, shapeless cloth hangs from her torso. Ugly blocks on her feet hover above the layer of water that floods the room. I stare at my own feet, pale and colorless, perched on the edge of the piece of shell I’m sitting in. I know my body. I wiggle my toes. 

“Hello?”

I bend my neck, side to side, then swing my head in a wildly irresponsible circle. My dry lips stretch, break, and draw away from my gums and teeth. Peculiar sore pinches prickle in the flesh under the skin of my cheeks. 

“Hello,” I echo. The word rumbles past a film of mucus in my throat, which, like a clump of fat blubber, drops with a wet thud from my lips. I cough hoarsely around it.

She moves closer, stepping into the thin liquid on the ground, which ripples in curious patterns. Her back is hunched, and her brow is crumpled in the space above her eyes. I mimic her expression, and she pauses. The girl lets out a breath, and I do it, too. Holding the air tightly in my lungs, the cage of my chest expanding. Then, release. My breath blasts into my skin, and I try to rub away the cold. 

Sounds are pouring from the girl’s mouth, but I am distracted. I trace fingers over my pale breasts and stomach and knees, and I shrink back from myself because it feels strange. I know my body, but I do not know this—the drag of nail on skin. She shrugs off one of the pieces draped over her shoulders, rummages in a pack for another piece—this one small, pliant, and triangular—and holds them out to me. 

“Here. Jacket and underwear.”

I make no move to take them. Strange, I think.

“We have to get going. Or I’m leaving without you.” Her voice is sterner, angrier. I take and shrug on the cloth—jacket—onto my back, and tuck away the soft, triangular piece into a pocket on the side. 

“Oh—you put it down here,” the girl motions between her legs, her cheeks reddening. “Put your legs in the holes. You have to cover it.”

The girl strides towards me and snatches the triangle away. She unfolds it and stretches it so that two holes appear, and instinctively, I place my left foot into the left hole, and right foot into the right. She pulls it up.

“Hello,” I manage. It gargles on my tongue. 

The girl's brows rise. Then, she shakes her head. 

“You poor thing. Follow me.”

She disappears into the rectangular dark, swift as a passing beam of light. The flood in the room trembles in her passing. I follow, and I leave the broken egg, white tile, and water beyond water. I leave behind everything I have ever known. 

*

“We’re going to follow the river,” the girl tells me.

“Hello,” I respond. 

I leave the laboratory—as the girl says—behind, and its shadow loses its grasp on my shoulders. Outside, slightly beyond the line of giant umber logs, topped with speckles and splashes of spiny bark, a great roaring fills my ears. My eyes do not feel large enough, but the girl moves quickly, and I follow. 

“Green," the girl says, pointing down, at our feet. "Blue," she says, pointing up.

The blades of green under my feet hurt. The warmth from the blue sky is odd, since the blue of the river is cold. At the river, the girl flicks a handful of water at me, and I hiss when it hits my skin. Our clothes lie below a tree dipping into the bend of the river. She laughs and draws up the roaring water into her hands. When she does, the ripples calm, and she wipes off the dried, tacky remnants of the egg off my legs and stomach. I shiver not at the cold, but at her touch. 

“What’s your name?” the girl asks. I do not know, but someone does, and I have an answer that I do not recognize. 

“Luna.”

“Hi, Luna,” she says, softly, and although my hair is heavy and damp on my neck, I feel it prickle. “It suits you. The hair, your skin. Look.”

She’s pointing into the water, and I do not know how to tell her that I am standing right next to her, and not where she gestures. Then, the sun shifts, I squint, and then I see. 

A figure, as white as light, stares back at me from the surface of the river. I do not know the discomfort that runs up my spine, but the one in the water seems afraid. Her lashes are colorless and her irises are a sickly, watery red, not the brilliant scarlet of the girl's hair. I do not like this one, I decide. I clamber out onto the riverbank, so that the pale, cold reflection will dissipate and exit the water that the girl stands in. She glows golden, warm. I shy away when she follows me. 

“Where are you going? We need to stay hidden from the bad guys,” the girl says. She grabs a handful of dark, black mud along the riverbank. 

As she starts to rub it into my hair, I find a word, and I protest, "No. I don't like."

“Too bad,” she says. “You can never be too careful. When a war goes long, soldiers get bored.”

She had mentioned the war before, the one that tore through her town and cast her into the borderland. The reason she was applying black paint over my cheeks. I did not know where it was from, where it was born. Still, I found that I didn’t mind the war, much, if the girl would crouch on her knees with her hands on my face. 

“I’m sorry,” I say. 

“Never mind it,” she responds. She dips her knuckles past my collarbones, and I shiver, again.

*

The sun's death on the horizon dips everything into an orange wash. We are nestled between two trees that grew apart at the base, with the girl's blanket over a pile of leaves. The river gurgles by, some distance away. I knaw on old, dried meat from the girl's sack, while leaning against her side for warmth. My knees are drawn up to my chin, scraped from the thorns and underbrush. The torn pair of socks on my feet are reduced to patches of cotton, and my feet are battered swollen and purple underneath.

The evening wind has a bite to it, but the girl tells me I’m lucky it’s summer.

I ask about winter. 

“Snow, as far as you can see. It’s this fluffy, gentle thing that falls out of the sky, up there, soft but angry and cold. You die so numb that even if I do this”—the girl pinches me, hard, and I yelp—“you wouldn’t feel anything.”

I wince and rub at the spot on my arm, over the jacket. I lean back against the mess of foliage and cloth underneath us, and the girl does the same. I peer up into the branches.

“Where does it come from?”

The girl shrugs. “Nowhere,” she says. “It just happens.”

“Like war,” I say. 

“Kind of.”

“And it happens? Always?”

“Yes.” 

I wait in the silence, but the girl doesn't speak again. I glance at her eyes, but they are still open—staring. 

I decide not to press her. It is summer, now.

*

After a moment, the girl's eyes do a curious thing. There's two rivers, small, coming down.

“This is called crying,” the girl says. “It happens when you’re sad. Or, maybe happy, or angry. Or lonely.”

“What is…”

“You know what happy is, I told you already.”

“I don’t understand. The water.” My tongue feels dumb in my mouth, and I fidget, as more tears spill past the girl's wet lashes. My eyes are dry. At once, there's a pang, as if someone clipped the side of my heart and left it bleeding into the rest of my body. I study the surface of my glassy skin to see if a cloud of red rises.

“When someone is crying,” the girl says, face obscured in shade, "You leave them alone until they stop doing that. When you cry, you do not tell.”

“I understand,” I say. I don’t.

*

“There is one more thing you must know,” the girl says, when she is done. I sit away from her, not looking, not speaking—leaving her alone. “But this will feel good.”

“What is that—feel good?”

The girl reaches out toward me, intertwines her fingers with mine, and my mouth goes dry. There is a mess of boiling heat in my stomach that spreads. She is staring at me so intensely that I find that I cannot move. There are fluttering birds inside me, beating their wings against my gut and bruising my organs. My blood is whipping itself into foam. 

“Stop me if you don’t want this.”

I don’t stop her. 

*

I don’t want this. 

I am dizzy. My eyes keep closing. Her hands, like her hair, are scalding, unbearable. They snake towards the space between my legs, and I cannot move. The night air is witness.

The night is silent.

*

“How was that?” the girl asks, after. 

“It felt good,” I say, because it did. Tears well up in my eyes, and I cry. I do not know if there is a word for how I suddenly wish I was back in the egg. Floating, ungrounded by the pit in my stomach.

I turn away from her. I do not tell. She leaves me alone. 

I do not know winter, but I imagine this is it.

*

The sun rises. I follow the girl, but I do not speak.

“Sh-h!” she hisses. I still, lifting one foot off the ground. Ahead, the river is split by a pointed, crumbling cliff, and there are two soldiers roughly obscured in the shadow, barely visible from our position on the opposite side. The two men chatter in low voices and pull on each other’s uniforms—speckled and decorated with odd symbols. Our bodies are barely hidden by bushes and tree trunks. 

The girl is staring at them, squinting. Her eyes roam over their patches, looking for—

“Oh,” she says, and she rises to her feet. She points both hands up to the sky and walks toward the soldiers. I follow, even as she wades across the river, but the pit in my stomach yawns. 

“Hello,” she calls. I know this careful, calculative tone. 

The soldiers turn, and I cannot see their eyes past the deep shadows on their face. They point a long, black stretch of metal into the girl's face, and, though I do not know what it is, the girl stiffens, and I know I should be afraid. 

“I have another,” the girl says. She smiles, but it wars with her cold eyes. “Born yesterday. Eager to please. A little slow, but I know that suits some of your tastes.”

A click echoes from deep inside the metal, and the girl's smile drops at once. One soldier, much larger than his partner, grabs me roughly by the neck, blunt nails digging into my flesh, but because the girl does not fight, neither do I. 

“Her name is Luna, if that matters.”

“It doesn't,” the other soldier chimes in. He has lighter eyes, higher cheekbones, but the same hunger as the older soldier that I can’t quite place. 

“You found a farm, then?”

“No,” the girl says. “Don't be greedy. Take her, she is not old enough to know anything. Let me go.” 

My voice stutters back to life, then. “I don’t understand.”

All eyes are on me, now, and I shrink. 

Even to me, I sound pathetic. I know they are speaking of me, of something I do not know. But I do know—I know of rolling waves of rivers, of silent night, of a burning ache between my legs. I try to cover my bare skin with my hands. My eyes are hot, and my heart dries up right in my chest, in its own home, and crumbles into dust.

“I am crying,” I say, to her. I am telling. I am saying, "do not leave me alone.” Her eyes are empty, and she stares through me.

I do not know what I am so broken about.

The soldiers take me.