Here, Already.

Winter blisters the world and holds its breath and exhales death across the earth. Flowers don’t bloom and green doesn’t return.

She stands inside her house and paces through the humid June air. She stares at the barren trees but the world fails to notice. The news is a spin cycle of mass shootings, bombings, and mindless speculation of the A-list.

She pockmarks the flesh around her fingernails with bites. The television and air conditioning and refrigerator and oven vent and oscillating fans and ceiling fans and dishwasher and washing machine and wireless home hubs all hum together in a crescendo of white noise. God forbid it ever get quiet. God forbid her thoughts.

The mania starts the winter night she first sees it. Though her backyard is painted purple with midnight, everything glows in the moon’s reflection on the snow. Her pale arms, nearly white, hang to her side as she tilts her head upward and stares at the thing above her.

An orb—innocuous—hovers above the shed. It doesn’t sway in the winter breeze. It doesn’t have color—but it isn’t colorless, either. More like a solid idea of a thing, holding everything within it and just barely beyond her grasp.

Though no color changes on its surface, she senses it looking around. It regards the trees that line her fence. It regards the crabgrass that sticks above the shallow layer of snow like wild hairs. Then, it regards her.

And, for the first time in 35 years, she regards herself. Not from a two-dimensional image reflecting back at her in water or glass. But as a whole, complete being. Every desire she ever had and ever will have. From the beginning of her consciousness—a bee sting on a playground, pulling a caramel from the cobwebs of her childhood home, falling onto a glass jar filled with lightning bugs—to the end of her consciousness, which starts with her pacing around a living room in a humid June while the world dies around her.

And now she is here, already. She acknowledges the end of her life with a final, fleeting thought—a care for the world around her one last time. She’s nervous for those she will leave behind. For those who will someday peel away from their white noise and realize that spring will never come.

The electronics fall quiet, and she looks around. This is the moment it showed her when winter was still winter and spring was still promised.

It appears before her again. But did it ever leave? Perhaps, like a shadow, it came into the world with her. Always unseen until it wanted her to see it. Still shapeless, it takes her hand. Her breath hitches—and she waits for the light to overtake her—and it does.

All of time and space and matter fold into her, then her next life takes shape.

***

David James is a writer and editor living in Denver, CO. He has a BFA in creative fiction writing from the University of Nebraska – Omaha, where he had a tenure as the editor-in-chief of the undergraduate literary magazine, 13th Floor. When he isn't reading or writing, his head is in the clouds.