As The Cold Seeps In by Mackinley Clevinger, February 22, 2016
This isn’t fair. How is this fair? I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t make myself move. How could this happen? Why? The cold had already set in, numbing me all over. What did I do to deserve this? The burning agony as I froze had already been and gone, leaving me with nothing. No sensation, my nerves dead. Why was I here? Why did I have to be here of all places? The cold had numbed an even greater pain, replacing it with the burning, and then with nothing. I’m going to die. It wasn’t the cold that had paralyzed me. No. I’m already dead. Just waiting for my brain to catch up. It was something else. Something I couldn’t remember.
I can’t move. My eyes are stuck open, unblinking. I’m broken. Why? What happened to me? All I see is glaring, white light. It’s a different shade on the left, with flutters of the brighter side moving around. Where am I? Why can’t I feel anything? I feel different, more than the cold freezing all sensation, more than whatever had happened before that. Why can’t I remember? I can’t think right. Something’s wrong. What happened? Why was something wrong? WHAT HAPPENED?
Something thundered into my back, launching me. The world spun, spiraling between the glaring white of the snow and the grey of the sky. Trees, towering but dead, swept past my vision. I hit something with a crunch, my side and shoulder in agony. I think it was a tree. My arm didn’t feel right, but my other hand still had the- I fell, out of control, right on the- axe. The blade punched through the skin of my stomach, blood trickling along its head to drip into the disturbed snow. I was on my hands and knees, trying not to move, watching the snow turn red all around me. I needed to keep moving, but I couldn’t. It hurt too much, even knowing what was still out there.
I let go of the handle of the axe. Hand shaking, trying not to move any other part of me besides that arm. It pulled at the skin around the axe-head, though. It hurt. Maybe I’d still be able- I remember pain. I was ripped away from the axe and tossed around, mauled and played with. It didn’t stop. I tried to do something, anything, but I didn’t have the power. It played with me, ripping me apart. It left me here. It hurt. I couldn’t even drag myself away after it left, couldn’t do anything but lie here as the cold set in. One agony for another, but finally I was numb.
I was dead. From the cold, the axe, the mauling… How could this happen? How was this fair? I was just… just… how did I… Where… I… I was… I was attacked. I was hurt. I’m dying. My mind was faltering again. Hold on to it. I’m dying. Why? I was left for dead. Why? Why did it happen to me? Why do I deserve this? It was growing harder to think. To hold on. Was it something I did? Was there something wrong with gathering wood to keep my family warm? Could the world not accept the loss of a few logs in exchange for saving lives?
The white light intensified, blanking out my vision. Is this it? My life ended, just like that? Chased down in the woods one day and left for dead? Why? What possible reason could there be for this? Maybe… Maybe there isn’t one. It was over. I could feel… something shutting down, a growing emptiness from a part of me I had never consciously felt before. Maybe this just happened. Not for anything on a grand scale, but as a part of life. There’s good, there’s bad, and sometimes you get mauled and left for dead for no reason. That’s just… Everything feels so… clear. I don’t know what part of me was left. I had no sensation, no existence, nothing more than a dwindling ability to think. This is it, whatever ‘it’ is. I… I think I’ve forgotten something. What… what am I? This isn’t… There’s… They… It dwindled to an ember, the barest speck of consciousness. I’d… It flared for a single instant, a message sent pulsing throughout the brain, neural connections used one final time before death took its due.
They needed me. I’d failed them