Frost - by Shade

With his vision blurred, a low hum encompassed his hearing, his senses all but one dulled, a coppery taste overwhelming his tongue. A translucent orb rolled down his cheek, mixing with grime and sweat, and he realized, distantly, that he was crying. Regret and a feeling of failure tugged at him. Streaks of white bled through the dark at the edges of his vision, and more tears joined their lone sibling at his jaw. I don't want to die, he thought, though no sound came.<del> </del>The kitchen smelled like burnt toast and his sister's cheap vanilla perfume, the kind she bought in bulk from the drugstore because she liked how it clung to her sleeves. She was standing on a chair to reach the good mugs, the ones their mother never let them use, feet bare against the peeling linoleum. "You're gonna break your neck," he said, not moving to stop her. "You're gonna break my heart if you don't hurry up and pass me the sugar." She didn't look down. She never looked down, not for him, not for anyone, like the ground was a rumor she didn't believe in. He passed it up. Their fingers brushed. Hers were always warm, even in winter, even when the radiator in the hallway rattled and gave up and their breath fogged in front of the TV. She used to press her palms flat against his cheeks when he was smaller, when a scraped knee felt like the end of something, and say “you're not allowed to be cold, that's my job”. He hadn't thought about that in years. The coffee went too long and turned bitter. She drank it anyway, made a face, laughed at herself. He remembered laughing too, a real one, from somewhere low in his chest, a place that would later go quiet and stay quiet for so long he'd forget it was ever there at all.She got down from the chair without falling. She always did. Somewhere between then and now, the quiet place had won. He couldn't say when. There wasn't a day he could point to, no single door that shut. Marcus used to text him most mornings. Nothing important, a bad joke, a picture of his dog doing something stupid, You up? with no real question behind it, just a way of saying I’m still here, are you?For a while he'd answered. Then he answered less. Then the texts changed shape without either of them naming itYou good?instead of the jokes, then just Hey :)sitting alone in the thread for days before Marcus tried again. The last one had said haven't heard from you in a while man, lmk you're aliveand he remembered reading it, remembered the phone lighting up his face in a dark room, remembered doing nothing at all. Not out of anger. Not even out of the numbness, exactly. He just hadn't been able to think of a single true thing to say back. Marcus stopped texting sometime after that. He didn't remember deciding not to care. He only remembered, one gray afternoon, noticing that he hadn't cared in a long time, and feeling nothing about that either.His sister had tried harder, the way sisters do. She'd shown up once, near the end, knuckles on a door he didn't open, her voice going from bright to careful to quiet through the wood “I know you're in there” until eventually even her footsteps retreated, unhurried, like she was giving him the dignity of not being heard leaving. He'd stood on the other side the whole time, hand flat against the door, and hadn't opened it. He couldn't have said why. The vanilla smell was gone from his life by then, replaced by something sharper, chemical, a smell he'd stopped noticing because it was always there, on his own hands now.<del> </del>The floor was cold against his cheek. He hadn't realized he'd fallen. The white streaks pulsed, brighter now, and beneath the hum he thought he heard her voice “you're not allowed to be cold” except it wasn't her voice at all, it was a stranger's, close and sharp and afraid, saying his name like a question. I don't want to die, he tried again, and this time something moved in his throat, a sound, small and raw, pushed out from underneath years of quiet. Hands were on him. Real hands, warm the way hers used to be. A door he hadn't heard open, then voices, two, maybe three, layered over each other in a language of urgency he didn't have to understand to recognize. Someone tilted his head. Someone else was counting, steady, the number climbing in a rhythm he couldn't follow but somehow found himself holding onto anyway, like a rope thrown into water. “Stay with me. Hey. Stay with me.” He wanted to answer, and that surprised him, sharp and sudden, cutting through the white the way her voice used to cut through a cold room. He hadn't wanted anything in so long that the feeling arrived unfamiliar, like a word in a language he used to speak fluently and had let go slack in his mouth.The floor was still cold beneath him, but there was warmth now too, pressed to his hands, his face, someone rubbing his knuckles like they were trying to strike a flame from them. He thought of his sister's palms. “You're not allowed to be cold, that's my job.”He thought: someone else's job, now. A stranger's job, and he was grateful for it in a way that felt too large for his body to hold. The white didn't recede all at once. It came in pulses, the dark taking ground and losing it, taking it and losing it again, and somewhere in that tide he surfaced enough to feel his own chest rise, once, involuntary, a small violence of air and then again, less violent the second time. "There you are," someone said.He didn't open his eyes. He wasn't sure yet that he could. But he felt his fingers twitch against the floor, felt someone catch that small movement and grip his hand like it meant something, like he meant something, and some small, buried part of him, the part that used to laugh from low in his chest, the part he'd thought had gone quiet for good stirred, just slightly, just enough.Not saved. Not yet. But held. And for the first time in longer than he could name, being held felt like something he wanted to stay for.

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