Stealing Snow

ONE

In the distance I could see a tree that seemed to scrape the sky in every direction, with gnarly branches and the strangest, almost luminescent white wood. The bark was covered top to bottom with intricate carvings. I had seen this tree before. I felt a pull to walk right over to it and run my fingers over the carving. But instead I turned away from the tree toward a loud, constant crashing sound: water. I looked down and saw that I was standing on the edge of a steep, rugged cliff when someone or something came at me from behind, shoving me hard.

I fell and fell and fell until my body hit the water. It was freezing cold. Cold like none id ever felt. The water cut me like needles piercing my skin. And then when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I opened my eyes, and saw it in the murky deep: tentacles, gills and teeth coming at me from the murky deep.

My arms flailed, I needed air. Which was worse, that thing in the water or drowning. I opened my mouth to scream as the thing wrapped its icy tentacles around me.

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When I woke that morning, Vern, one of Whittaker’s orderlies, was standing over me.

“hush child” she said quietly. She had a syringe in her hand and she was prepared to use it.

I caught my breathe and threw back the covers to check my leg for the mark made by that thing in the water. The sheets were drenched, but it was my sweat. There was no mark and no water creature to blame.

“snow”

The orderlies – or white coats as we like to call them—weren’t really our friends even thought hey were the only people we saw every day. Some of them spoke to us, some mocked us. Some laughed at us and moved us from locked room to locked room like furniture. But vernaliz O’Hara was different. She treated me like a person even when I was a completely drugged out vegetable and even when I had the shakes. She didn’t know which person I was at the moment, hence the syringe.

“id rather not knock you out today, your mother is coming” Vern said in her maple syrupy southern accent.

Her low, long brown ponytail swung behind her as she stepped away from my bed and slipped the syringe back into her scrubs. Looking up at her, I marveled at how close her head came to the ceiling. At six feet nine, she was an abnormally tall woman. I half expected to feel a breeze from the whiplash of Vern’s hair.

Depending on which patient you asked Vern was a giantess, or an amazon.Or a jord, the Norse goddess who gave birth to thor, the god who sometimes shows up in comic book movies. Id looked up Vern’s condition in dr. Harris’collection of old encyclopedias in the library. Vern suffered from acromegaly,a hormonal condition that occurs when to much growth hormone is produced by the pituitary gland, which resulted in a bigger-than-everyone-else Vern. But suffered was the wrong word. Vern owned her size, and it made her the perfect muscle for Whittaker. No patient could find his or her way around the wall of woman she was. Not even me.

I held out my hand “fine” I mumbled

“she speaks” Vern assessed, her over sized green eyes light up with surprise.

Vern wasn’t being sarcastic. Because of the meds I barely speak, except for swear words. And also, there was no one I wanted to talk to. Except my mother, when she was visiting and of course, bale.

I had bitten Vern once—right after Dr. Harris told me I couldn’t see bale last year, I had expected Vern to treat me differently after that, but she didn’t. she was the same kind Vern. I had wanted to ask her why, but I never did.

“did you have that dream again” Vern asked with the same level of anticipation she had for the next episode of the end of almost, one of her ‘stories’ we watched during supervised recreation hour. I shook my head, a lie my body automatically told.

They encouraged talking about the subconscious at Whittaker. But I didn’t like to, I was determined to keep my dreams mine and nobody else’s. Even though they were often twisty and dark, that were the only place I got to get close to bale. I had slipped and told Vern once. A fact she would not let me forget.

Last nights dream had been bale-free. And a little stranger than usual. The tree was in it again,huge and looming, taking up the whole sky. Then there was that thing. the memory of it flooded in distracting me, pulling me back into the cold, dark water.Patiently, Vern waited for me to sit up and pulled out a fresh pair of Whittaker grey sweats to wear. She sighed a heavy sigh that showed me her disappointment.

I slipped out of my paper-thin cotton pajamas in front of her and caught a glimpse of myself in the plastic mirror on the door of my closet. Since the kiss, I had been searching for whatever it was about me that had spooked bale.

My face looked the same to me. Brown eyes pale skin (Because of the lack of sun), the normal white scars that tracked down one side of my body. Despite many surgeries my arm and torso would forever bear the web like tattoo that had bought me here.

The white streaks that wove through my ash blonde hair had grown only more pronounced this year. Vern blamed it on the new cocktail, but I didn’t see any other patients going grey, and plenty of us in ward D were taking the same prescription.

“maybe we should put some new art up, you’re really getting good” Vern said

I shrugged but I felt a surge of pride underneath the gesture. But I kept doing it for me, sometimes I drew other patients. A lot of my drawings were of bale. There were dozens of them, in fact. I drew the inmates as they were and as they wanted to be. Wing thought that she was an angel or something, so I gave her wings. Chord believed in time travel, so I would draw him anywhere or anytime he wanted to be in. he once told bale that he ‘blinked’ from place to place. That was what he called it: blinking. He could come and go from the signing of declaration of independence and back in a blink. Time was infinite and different for him. I envied him for that, I would give anything to go back to before the kiss with bale.

Sometimes I sketched Whittaker. The asylum had a lot of rooms. But there was a dividing line that separates what the parents saw and what the patients saw. My room was pretty spare: white sheets, walls, a cabinet. A full-size plastic mirror and a tiny desk in the corner. The only decorations anywhere were the drawings hung up with duct tape. I had Vern to thank for that. The rest of Whittaker looked like an English manor: high ceilings, fancy furniture and a chandelier at the front desk.

Sometimes I drew my dreams that ranged from blinding white landscapes to dark execution scenes that I can’t really explain. The worst one was of me standing on top of a mountain and below there was a bunch of bodies, all ice blue like they had been frozen to death. Dr. Harris thought that drawing was a good way to express my anger and get all the ‘ridiculous’ things out of my head.By getting them out of my mind he thought that would draw a line between what was real and what was just fantasy. It worked for a while, but dr. Harris just wanted my drawing to be a gateway to me to talk about my feelings. That rarely happened– or just not in the way he wanted.

“almost time for visiting hours” she pressed, she was walking to the cart to grab the tiny paper cup that contained today's pill

“what will it be today Vern, sleepy or dopey” I asked

I had affectionately named my myriad pills after the seven dwarfs,basing on how the made me feel. Today there was a green pill in the cup.

“happy” I grimaced, that one didn’t really work anymore

“you are chatty today” Vern half asked, c*****g her head

I pulled the nondescript hospital uniform over my head, and I pulled on the pants. Vern handed me the paper cup and waited for me to gulp down the pill,which was so big I scraped down the side of my throat even with a sip of water.Vern took back the cup and waited for me to open my mouth, to see if I had actually swallowed the pill.

In that half-a-heartbeat pause, a wave of resentment flooded in. it was that moment in our daily routine that kept us from being friends. It was more than the lock on the door or the syringe in Vern’s pocket. It was her job not to trust. And it didn’t matter that she was the only one that talked to me, she was paid to be here.