1.
It happened when his elder brother Nick dragged him out to go frog catching by the river, pulling him by the hand until their boots were tromping through cold mud. Only a thin layer of trees separated the riverside from their backyard, the rushing water muffling the sounds of traffic, but it was enough to make him feel far from home. He peered across what seemed to him a vast and terrible wilderness. The wind cut across his cheek, rendering him both feral and solemn. Unrefined ore, rather than young boy.
Still, he was bored of frog catching, and turned his attention to the stones at the water’s edge. He walked along with his head bowed to them, sometimes crouching to examine one. After each he had to warm his hands inside his jacket. They were like ice to touch.
Nick’s hunt continued deeper in the woods, leaving him alone. Neither of them noticed the separation.
That was when Marshall found the piece of quartz.
When it caught his eye, glinting in the pale sunlight, he thought it was ice -but when he held it, he called it a diamond, because that was the only word he had for a white, translucent stone. A beautiful stone. The sort of object you could picture having a soul.
This ‘diamond’ was stained red in some places, veined black in others, and was no larger than a matchbox. But he knew the value of such a thing.
Marshall looked up at the river. The quartz was heavy in his hand.
He threw it as hard as he could.
It made an arc, splashed into the center of the river, and vanished.
#
He regretted throwing it.
There was no reason to have thrown it -it could have been his. Just his. A beautiful thing for his own, and he’d tossed it away. He paced along the edge of the water, eyes on the spot where the ripples were still fading -could it be retrieved? It could, surely. It wasn’t gone. It was just under water.
He paused, and stooped to dip his fingers in the shallows.
It was cold, but not unbearably so. He looked to the river again. Wide, but hard to say how deep. He didn’t think it could have gone over his head...
He took off his shoes and socks, rolled up the legs of his pants as far as they would go. The river was not cold. It was not deep. He could do this.
He stepped into the water.
It was an electric shock, but he gritted his teeth and took another step. Then another. And another. Four steps in and the water was lapping at his knees, making them quake, but on the plus side, his feet were going numb. Two more steps. A third.
The water overtook his pant-legs, climbed up to his waist. With childlike doggedness, he did not even consider turning back. He kept moving forward.
Maybe four steps from the center of the river, his foot slipped, and he toppled over.
The cold was a hard punch to his chest, stunning him, so that he went limp under the surface, seeing stars. The moving water pushed him down, far deeper than he’d imagined it to be, and turned him around until he had no idea which way was up.
He had every right to panic.
For a brief moment, he did, opening his mouth to let out a howl of fear -when he felt someone’s fingers press to his lips.
He wrenched his eyes open. There was no one there.
But he felt something there, some presence. It didn’t want him to be scared, and so he wasn’t. It wound itself around him, and pulled him deeper into the water, sinking heavy in the dark.
Yet he felt light. Filled with light.
By contrast, his lungs were burning. ‘I’m going to die down here,’ he thought, and for some reason this was not a terrible thing. Whatever it was that was holding him seemed to reach into his chest, and cradle something in its hand-
Something else, something hard, grabbed the back of his neck. It started pulling him up, out of the water. He struggled, kicked, punched. He didn’t want to go.
The presence didn’t want him to go either. It held fast to whatever it was inside him--
Until it was torn away
The pain knocked him out.
It only lasted a few seconds. He opened his eyes on the shore. Nick was hitting him hard in the back.
“What were you thinking?!” Nick yelled. Marshall tried to crawl from him, but his whole body felt shattered. Something deep inside ached and itched. Nick seemed to have no pity. “Because of you Mom is going to kill me!”
“I’m s-sorry…”
“You are so…!”
But he had no words for what Marshall was.
They tried to stay outdoors until their clothes dried, but the biting wind made this impossible. With miserable tears freezing on their cheeks, they returned home, and endured the expected shrieks from their mother. She slapped them both, told them if they caught pneumonia that was just too bad, they didn’t have money to take them to the doctor, and then barricaded herself in her room. Their father took care of them, even lighting a fire for them to sit by in their PJs. Nick couldn’t stop moaning. He told everyone, over and over again, that it wasn’t his fault.
Marshall said nothing, kneading at his chest, where the itch was buried. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something precious had been lost.
2.
It happened when Marshall was coming home from a friend’s twenty-first birthday party, stumbling around under orange streetlights and watching his breath cloud the air. It was nice to be drunk. It dulled the itch inside him, the one he’d had as long as he could remember; it was enough to make him feel like a different person. He grinned into what seemed to him a dark and sensuous night. The wind cut across his cheek, rendering him both dangerous and brittle (as opposed to just brittle, all the time). Over-tempered steel, rather than young man.
He passed the intersection of Richie and Firth, and turned to make his usual shortcut through the ravine. He still lived at home (Nick did not -he’d made his escape with a college girlfriend at the age of sixteen, and their parents never forgave him), and tried to always come in through the back door, which was closer to his room. Besides, he liked to walk by the river. He was told he’d almost drowned in it once, but that didn’t bother him. On nights when he couldn’t sleep and found himself passing the thin layer of trees, he pretended he was visiting a girlfriend.
He’d had real girlfriends, but never loved them. At least, he didn’t think so. He imagined love would feel like snowfall -he associated all gentle things with that sort of quietude-but every relationship he’d ever had turned out to be noisy. It made his itch worse.
The thought of snow turned his head up, squinting at the sky through the canopy. It was cold tonight, but not that cold. He pulled his jacket closer anyway.
When he brought his eyes back down, they fell on the river, now just ahead.
That was when he saw her.
She was under the water.
At first he didn’t believe what he saw, running to the water’s edge to confirm it as a trick of the light, of the alcohol, but the image persisted. There was a woman in the river, naked, lying flat on the bottom like a stone.
He yelped, fumbled for his phone. A crime had been committed, obviously, and he needed to call for help, to tell someone she was here-
Something deep within him ached. And tugged.
He looked back up at her.
The woman was alive. Somehow. She was moving. She was-
His eyes widened.
She was arching her back, thighs pressed together, the edges of her body cutting through the water. Her eyes were closed, head back, throat exposed. She responded to the freezing river as if it were a caress.
He was rooted to the spot. Transfixed.
At length, she opened her eyes. He could not see well enough to know what expression they held, but she seemed to consider the sky for a few moments before moving. She rose -not swimming or floating, but standing, moving slow. Her head and torso emerged, turned in his direction.
Her hair was red. Her eyes were black. Her skin was an unearthly, translucent white.
She was beautiful, whatever she was. The sort of phantom you could picture stealing a soul.
He stepped forward, without thinking. Water flooded his shoe. He barely noticed.
She stepped forward as well, wading towards him now, the water breaking against her hips. Their eyes were locked. An echo of memory sounded, words in child’s scrawl:
I’m going to die down here.’
What an odd thing to remember.
She came within a foot of him, and-
She was like ice to touch.
Before he understood what was happening, her lips closed over his, hard, and forced them open, breathing winter air into him.
His lungs were burning.
He had every right to panic. He-
Her hand pressed into his chest, fingers spread, and applied the slightest pressure.
Something lost clicked back into place. He ripped away from her, gasping, but had to grip her shoulders to avoid falling over. All of him shook. She watched his reaction with a faint smile.
The itch was gone. He was filled with light.
“You…” he said. But he did not have words for what she was.
She pressed her forehead to his. “I did not mean to,” she said.
When he could think of nothing to say, and when her attention returned to his lips, he allowed himself to be lowered onto the riverside.
#
White, drifting overhead.
There was snow that night after all.