A Burning Question

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Water was bleeding through the canvas of my sneakers, soaking my socks. One step at a time, my legs labored through the suffocating blanket of fresh snow. It had been about 1,200 steps since I had last heard the voices trailing behind me. Their grasp loosened the further I got away from the cabin. My memories were slowly returning to me in a haze, like your vision might after standing up too quickly.

What I remembered first was why I was running. Exactly what about those voices made me want to run, I couldn’t remember. I could, however, remember the moment where the fear rose up from a pit in my stomach and decided “fight” was not the better of the two options available.

The voices. They sounded like a crowd of 30 people you’re almost able to recognize, speaking in perfect unison. There were glints of my uncle, the liquor store owner at the end of the road, old teachers, my mom…

My mom. Everything was normal until she opened the door. There was this old man. He was a nice enough looking guy. He had a curly, unkept beard that covered everything from the bottom of his nose to his Adam’s apple. His lips were hidden, but his beard moved as he asked my mom a handful of strange questions. His tone made it sound like he was genuinely curious, but not concerned.

My mom was nice enough to answer him when he asked, “What time is it?” and, more concerningly, “Where are we?”. He delivered the next question without any pretense of politeness, almost as if he was testing her.

“Who are you?”

My mom paused at this. She stood in silence for what felt like 30 seconds, staring at him vacantly as she struggled with the realization that she hadn’t a clue. Fear grew in her eyes before bubbling over into a calm, eerie nothingness. Her eyes flickered back and forth like a printer that was stuck in a loop, endlessly copying and printing a blank page.

My dad’s boots now thumped against the hardwood behind us as he came through the back door, holding a bundle of firewood. The man cocked his head sideways to look beyond my mom and made eye contact with him. I can’t remember what he asked, but, eventually, my dad's eyes were fluttering too.

So there my parents stood, side by side, staring lifelessly at the man in the doorway. The cold wind was kicking snow and frozen dirt past his feet and onto the edge of the living room carpet. The man’s eyes were now closed and he was breathing heavily with a smile, like someone reminiscing in a fond memory.

The man was undisturbed by my cries. They started as confused calls toward my parents and snapped into a silent confusion as they both turned toward me with unfamiliar stares.

It wasn’t until I eventually saw my parents again that they educated me on the life cycle of these monsters.

They feed on memories. They knock on your door like a neighbor asking for sugar and verbally plant a seed in your brain that grows like cancer. Usually, whenever you’re asked a question, your mind sends up a little probe. That probe flies through the filing cabinets of your mind until eventually it lands on the answer. In this case, it lands more like an ember, sparking a fire that consumes everything around it with an unstoppable force. The more questions they ask, the fewer answers you have.

But for now, I didn’t know any of this. I had no idea what was happening to my parents or whether that man had stayed in the house after I sprinted down the hallway and blew out the back door. For now, there was only the snow. Three feet of snow and ten freezing toes that had stopped feeling anything as of 15 minutes ago.

As I pushed off of trees and forced my way through this white, fluffy tar pit, I heard the whispers reach my ears again. They sounded like they had been traveling in the air for a while. My breathing stopped for a moment as I listened. Once I felt ready to take another step, they picked back up, much closer now.

I urged my legs to move faster. There was nowhere to go, but I knew I needed to be anywhere but here. All that I could see in front of me was a small frozen lake, with the faint scar of an ice fishing hole my dad and I had made yesterday.

Heaving through the snow, I suddenly felt my foot pop out of its boot, with my sock still plastered to the inside. I looked down and tried to understand the lump of frozen blue skin I was looking at. As I took a barefoot step, an army of needles stabbed into every millimeter of skin.

I felt another whisper hit my ear, so close now that the wind coming off its lips made the hairs on my neck stand up. It sounded like my mom and dad whispering in unison. It sounded like they were reciting a story they used to tell me while I was falling asleep as a child. Well, I presume it was from when I was a child because that was years ago, right? Maybe 5 or 10 years ago?...

That probe was running through my brain looking for an answer. More than that, it was scrambling to find anything; running through the hallways in my mind, opening every drawer with no avail, finding only cobwebs.

I craned my neck 180 degrees and saw him only a few feet away now. His grey beard was peppered with snowflakes, and his eyes were hungry. I saw his beard elongate slightly as his chapped lips cracked opened to ask me a question.

I whipped back around to run away and felt the snow pulling against my legs. Falling down, unable to stop my momentum, I put my hands out. My arms sank deep into the snow, barely stopping my face from doing the same.

I began to crawl helplessly as I heard him behind me, battering me with questions. I instinctively knew not to answer them verbally, but it was almost impossible to stop myself from entertaining them subconsciously. This task became much easier as my mind shifted towards the freezing water drenching the sleeves of my coat and the canvas of my jeans.

I continued to crawl away while I rummaged for any single memory I had left. One of the few being the image of my parents standing there in the doorway. This fading memory generously left out their stoic faces, allowing me to remember their green (blue?) eyes as they had always been.

I couldn’t end up like them. They looked exactly like Grandma did toward the end. I can still see her watching TV, finishing a sleeve of Oreos (Chips Ahoy?) as she watched Wheel of Fortune. The chime of white squares reminded her of a time when she might have been able to guess those words herself.

I suddenly felt hot breath on the back of my neck, accompanied by the yearning moan of a starving man who was now taking his first bite of food in days.

I felt my fingertips scrape against something hard and opened my eyes to see, what I assumed, was my own face. It was slightly discolored by the lake's glassy ice inches away from my nose but, yes, I recognized those eyebrows. Someone used to say I looked like that actor… who was that actor?

I started to crawl slowly away, my hands slipping on the ice underneath me as I pushed out further into the lake. My body was failing me as badly as my mind at this point. All I had left was my heart beating quickly, the blood in between my ears, and an image of those two people in the doorway. Who were those people?

I felt myself gripping that picture firmly in my mind, crumpling the edges as I felt it trying to be ripped out of my grasp. I couldn’t let these people be taken away from me, whoever they were.

As the whispers crept up on me again, I put my hand out and felt my fingers slip into a thin crack. I saw the edges of a square that had been cut into the ice; someone must have been ice fishing here recently.

I crawled further towards it, the edge of this detached ice block bobbing under my weight. My hand dipped into the water. The pain felt familiar. I told my parents later how much it felt like moving your arm after sleeping on it for too long. I breathed out and pushed my arm further into the water, covering my shoulder. I heard the man's whispers fade into silence as I slid my whole body into the water.

As I sank deeper; all feeling began to fade away. And as gravity put more and more distance between me and the monster on the surface, I fell asleep. This sleep brought a swirl of beautiful dreams. I dreamt about how wonderful this last week was at the cabin. How excited I was to tell my class about it on Monday. I dreamt about my parents and the board games we played here every year. Water filled my lungs and warmth filled my heart.

I opened my eyes and saw my parents at the bottom of the lake, smiling once again. I swam happily towards them. It was so wonderfully warm. The sky was bright, and the sun was beginning to rise.