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Excerpt from When the Snow Flies by Kiki Howell & Gina Kincade
A
few more deep breaths later, she shivered violently, but began her
trek around the labyrinth. She stumbled over the stones that edged
the pathway a few times when patches of clouds blocked out the moon’s
light. Looking up, she expected to just see a glimmer of white
brilliance fighting to shine through the delicate filaments that had
become infused with dark grey matter. Instead, a shadow flew over
her. One too large to be anything her mind could figure out.
She
hadn’t realized that she’d fallen to a crouch until her body
swayed as she looked up, trying to get a better impression of what
had to be a plane or something descending to the earth. Strangely,
she hadn’t heard a sound. In fact, the eerie silence unnerved her
further. Her trembling fingers pressed against the frigid dirt as her
only source of support. Falling to her butt as her gaze followed the
tremendous mass, she made out a body too rounded for a plane, with
wings too animal-like to be inanimate. In a split second, a scream
lodged in her throat as the wing things flapped, rustling the tree
branches with sudden gusts of air. A long tail seemed to follow
behind, swinging to one side as it glided effortlessly around to come
back her way, losing altitude as the thing moved.
She
stayed in that odd position, seated on the ground, body curled up,
with one arm back behind her holding her up as she used the other one
to cover her face while the ground shook beneath her when the beast
landed maybe ten feet away. With her heart pounding so hard she could
hear the erratic beat of the damned thing in her head, she blinked
several times as the image before her registered to fantastical
proportions. The fact that Anna saw something out of a storybook or a
fairy tale made the only sense her perceptions could come up with,
and that unnerved her. So much so, she was wound up like a clock
about to explode, spewing gears and gadgets all over the place. The
analogy for her head being about to explode based on an image from an
old cartoon she’d watched as a child gave her pause. A moment of
lunacy that served as a much needed reprieve, since reality didn’t
make any sense at all.
Coping
mechanisms. She’d heard a lot about them in therapy. In fact, she’d
basically left the practice since she hadn’t been ready to give
them up. Snippets of songs would come into her head now, memories
from childhood of dancing like a loon in the kitchen with her mother
when holidays provided long days of baking. These created a
preoccupation with remembering every word of the tune, looking up the
video, studying the career of the singer, all in an attempt to calm
the sudden onslaught of tears. To numb the painful ache in her chest.
At
times, she raged at her body. Her heart had the audacity to feel like
it had stopped beating, if even for a second. Her lungs deflated,
ceased to do their job. All of these sensations served as a tease
when she had to remain in this life, too squeamish, too much a
coward, to end her own existence though she’d failed their suicide
test more than a few times. The desire to find peace in the afterlife
with her lost family got trampled by a lesson on suicide and sin her
mother had once taught her. Though, she didn’t even know what or if
she believed anymore as far as beliefs went, anything to do with
faith and religion.. The closest thing she’d come to prayer was the
screaming in her head. The raging at some invisible entity around her
so-called life.
This
confusion continued, rattling her to her core, as this thing,
whatever the hell it was—and hell born it could be, given its
monstrous size and shape—stared at her. Metal-colored eyes
glistened in the faint, cloud-infused moonlight. The size of
footballs, they blinked in a never-ending gaze that mesmerized her.
The world seemed to spin as millions of overacting nerve cells tensed
her muscles to run. Yet, she didn’t move for some strange fear of
being swallowed up whole or burnt to a crisp like in those stories of
dragons. Sadly, as her eyes focused, the more this thing as tall as a
house resembled just such a mythic creature. It seemed the
fundamental law guiding her decision to remain a statue was the
thought that if prey moved, it got eaten.
